Zora Neale Hurston Quotes

A scene of misery and gloomy despair of a community of people who have been plunged abruptly from prosperity to a complete want of the most essential things of life.

There is something about poverty that smells like death. Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry season and rotting around the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves. The soul lives in sickly air. People can be slaveships in shoes.

Poverty ennobles no one; it brutalizes common people and makes them hungry and old.

Aspiring beggary is wretchedness itself.

To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.

Poverty is the worst form of violence.

One-third of our people were dangerously ill, getting worse hourly, and we felt sure of meeting the same fate, with death as our only prospect, which in such a country was much worse yet.

There's this huge number of desperate people.

Where is there beauty when you see deprivation and starvation?

We hate our squalor.

Ignorance, filth, and poverty are the missionaries of crime.

Whole families used to starve in their cabins without their plight being discovered until the stench of their decaying corpses attracted notice.

From these cities they would go on again, by the roads of vines and olives, through squalid villages, where there was not a hovel without a gap in its filthy walls, not a window with a whole inch of glass or paper; where there seemed to be nothing to support life, nothing to eat, nothing to make, nothing to grow, nothing to hope, nothing to do but die.

What can he do who lacks the necessary work, if he comes to be unemployed? He has nothing but to let himself die of hunger. Then a few phrases of pity will thrown on his cadaver.

There was a time when I had nothing. I lost everything.

I know what it is to have nothing.

And one thing to be remembered: it is not that the people who are poor, starving, become frustrated with life - no. They cannot become frustrated. They have not lived yet - how can they be frustrated? They have hopes. A poor man always has hopes that something is going to happen - if not today then tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow; if not in this life then in the next life.

Feel like a broke-down engine, ain't got no drivin' wheel. You all been down and lonesome, you know just how a poor man feels.

Loneliness and hunger were my fortunes of creation.

Death is easier than a wretched life; and better never to have born than to live and fare badly.

We were poor, my mother and I, living in a world of doom and gloom, pessimism and bitterness, where storms raged and wolves scratched at the door.

In Hanover Park they highlighted the terrible plight of backyard dwellers and the fact that year after year nothing has been done to help you: the hope and despair you all live with every day.

The themes that make one laugh always stem from poverty, hunger, misery, old age, sickness, and death. These are the themes that make Italians laugh, anyway.

In 1843, everybody was hungry, unemployed, and conditions were very bad.