Zora Neale Hurston Quotes

No mat­ter how much I try and hide this, bit by bit, I start to fall apart.

Maybe all the strings inside him broke.

People who are extremely inside their head, like he was, are caught in a neurosis that goes round and round. Then something will hook them and take them to their end and they can't control it.

Dreaming men are haunted men.

The part of me which wanders through my mind and never sees or feels actual objects, but which lives in and moves through my passions and my emotions, experiences this world as a horrible nightmare.

Sometimes my heart hurts so much, I beat it with my fists. I try to run. But you cannot run from this. It waits for you. Even when you think you have escaped it, it is there.

I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.

My soul is dark with stormy riot: directly traced over to diet.

I'm very emotional; I think I may go mad in several years' time.

Of all afflictions, the worst is self-contempt.

I remember one day sitting at the pool and suddenly the tears were streaming down my cheeks. Why was I so unhappy? I had success. I had security. But it wasn't enough. I was exploding inside.

... madness entered my veins.

Conscience: something that feels terrible when everything else feels well.

When you're at war with yourself, you will go under.

I hit my head against the wall because I don't want to know all the terrible things that I know about. I don't want to feel all these wretched things, but they're in me already. If I don't get rid of them, I'm not ever going to feel anything else.

I will not have him in my brain;there is no room for anyone else in the cakeshop of agony. it's crowded enough in there already.

Affliction hardens and discourages us because, like a red hot iron, it stamps the soul to its very depths with the scorn, the disgust, and even the self-hatred and sense of guilt that crime logically should produce but actually does not.

I pushed my ragged mouth against the mirror. A thousand crushed bleeding lips pushed back at me.

I am well in body although considerable rumpled up in spirit.

How sick i am! that thought Always comes to me with horror. Is it this strange for everybody? But such fugitive feelings have always been my metier.

She'd never imagined it like this-when she thought of someone (a woman like herself)losing her mind, she'd imagined shrieks and wails, hallucinations; but at that moment it had seemed clear that there was another way, far quieter; a way that was numb and hopeless, flat, so much so that an emotion as strong as sorrow would have been a relief.

so your father told you once that you were his princess you won't see the castle you cannot find your prince and now you've grown a lot and your dress don't fit right your daddy's not a hero he stole your chariot so here you are in pieces trying to prove to us it's real the softness of your smile and the lies you want to feel the scales beneath your skin are showing off today there's evil in your heart and it wants out to play there's evil in your heart and it wants out to play there's evil in your heart and I have made a home here for me you'll burn it down with your fantasy

He wished he could relieve himself of his doubts and guilts half as easily.

Pain - physical, emotional and spiritual pain - is more than just a condition that needs to be silenced, numbed or "fixed." Pain in all its forms is also a message, a kind of distress signal to our hearts and minds. There are times when it's really important to tune into that message and just listen to it. When we don't listen, our understanding of the world gets more and more distorted, and we become capable of doing things we very often regret.