Zora Neale Hurston Quotes

I think one of the most important things we can do as feminists is acknowledge that, even though we have womanhood in common, we have to start to think about the ways in which we're different, how those differences affect us, and what kinds of needs we have based on our differences.

When I came to America, there were two kinds of women: women who looked serious and who didn't wear color and print, and women who looked girly and feminine and like second wives.

I identify with my womanhood before anything else because that's what I deal with when I am alone.

American and French culture are really, really different, but in a way it's funny.

Only a woman can write what it is to feel as a woman, to be a woman.

When I was living in England I found that the more I lived abroad, the more American I discovered I was.

My American walking shoes are new, and my Oriental eyes are old.

The black woman had had to struggle against being a person of great strength.

One of the defining characteristics or difference between today's illegal immigration and the immigration of old is the immigrants of the late 1800s through the early 1920s came here desiring to become Americans. They wanted to become part of what was a unique and distinct American culture. They were all coming from tyranny of one kind or another.

I am neither romantic nor a visionary, and that is my weakness and perhaps my power; at any rate it is one difference. In less romantic and visionary terms, I am a Jew, (with powers of introspection and eclecticism attendant, perhaps.) But I am alien to your natural grace, to the spirit which you would know as a participator in America.

It has always seemed to me a great honor to be called an Irish poet. I don't think I will ever lose that, but it's also a great honor to be a woman poet. I put those things together.

I don't believe that there is fair enough understanding of either our status as women or the total context of our lives, which is very rich and multi-faceted.

All the things that are taboo are the things that are not normal, and all the things that are not normal are the things that are exclusively about physically being a woman.

I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character. How could I know these things do not mix?

My conception around being a woman in 2016 has definitely been shifting over the past year, because I feel like I'm proud of womanhood, and I feel attached to it, and at the same time I'm someone who doesn't believe in having a gender binary, and so often times I separate those two concepts in my mind - the concept of being a woman and the concept of being a girl or being female, being kind of attached to a certain gender identity.

Let me first state forthright that contrary to what we've often read in books and heard from preachers, when you are a woman, you don't feel like the Devil.

Womanhood is the great fact in her life; wifehood and motherhood are but incidental relations.

It's quintessentially American to transform your family.

I think I was always informally thinking about choice from when I was a very young child because I was born to Sikh immigrant parents, so I was constantly going back and forth between a Sikh household and an American outside world, so I was going back and forth between a very traditional Sikh home in which you had to follow the Five K's.

Any woman is sexual, absolutely.

The writer in America isn't part of the culture of this country. He's like a fine dog. People like him around, but he's of no use.

My first few weeks in America are always miserable, because the tastes I am cursed with are all of a kind that cannot be gratified here, and I am not enough in sympathy with our gross public to make up for the lack on the aesthetic side. One's friends are delightful; but we are none of us Americans, we don't think or feel as the Americans do, we are the wretched exotics produced in a European glass-house, the most displaced and useless class on earth!

I've come from a very masculine country to a feminine country. England was very masculine; people went from England to abroad, and they landed from above and they said "These are the gods you will worship, these are the crops you will grow, now go away and do it." Which is a manly attitude. Americans go abroad and they say, "Try not to quarrel so much", which is a feminine attitude.

People from all over the world came to America and assimilated into a single culture rooted in the founding, which is rooted in individual liberty and primacy of citizen over government. Everybody who came here, that's what drew them.

There ain't nothin' like a Black woman.