“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
Источник: Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Ch. 3, p. 21.
Зора Ниэл Хёрстон — американская писательница-афроамериканка , фольклористка и антропологистка, более всего известная как автор романа «Их глаза видели Бога» . Участвовала в движении так называемого Гарлемского ренессанса. Wikipedia
“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
Источник: Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Ch. 3, p. 21.
“I love myself when I am laughing… and then again when I am looking mean and impressive.”
Источник: I Love Myself When I Am Laughing... And Then Again: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader
“Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me.”
How It Feels to Be Colored Me (1928)
Контексте: Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It is beyond me.
But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small things priceless and worthless. A first-water diamond, an empty spool, bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since crumbled away, a rusty knife-blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two still a little fragrant. In your hand is the brown bag. On the ground before you is the jumble it held — so much like the jumble in the bags, could they be emptied, that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place — who knows?
“Mystery is the essence of divinity”
Источник: Dust Tracks on a Road
“If you are silent about the pain they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”
Источник: Their Eyes Were Watching God
“I am crazy about the idea of Democracy. I want to see how it feels.”
"Crazy for This Democracy" in Negro Digest (December 1945).
Контексте: I accept this idea of democracy. I am all for trying it out. It must be a good thing if everybody praises it like that. If our government has been willing to go to war and sacrifice billions of dollars and millions of men for the idea I think that I ought to give the thing a trial.
The only thing that keeps me from pitching head long into this thing is the presence of numerous Jim Crow laws on the statute books of the nation. I am crazy about the idea of Democracy. I want to see how it feels.
“I accept this idea of democracy. I am all for trying it out.”
"Crazy for This Democracy" in Negro Digest (December 1945).
Контексте: I accept this idea of democracy. I am all for trying it out. It must be a good thing if everybody praises it like that. If our government has been willing to go to war and sacrifice billions of dollars and millions of men for the idea I think that I ought to give the thing a trial.
The only thing that keeps me from pitching head long into this thing is the presence of numerous Jim Crow laws on the statute books of the nation. I am crazy about the idea of Democracy. I want to see how it feels.
“Some people could look at a mud puddle and see an ocean with ships.”
Источник: Their Eyes Were Watching God
Вариант: Love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.
Источник: Their Eyes Were Watching God
“She had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her.”
Источник: Their Eyes Were Watching God
“Those that don't got it, can't show it. Those that got it, can't hide it.”
Вариант: If you haven’t got it, you can’t show it. If you have got it, you can’t hide it.
Источник: Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), Ch. 12 : My People! My People!
“Research is formalized curiosity.”
It is poking and prying with a purpose. It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell therein.
Источник: Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), Ch. 10 : Research, p. 143.
Вариант: There is two things everybody got to find out for theirselves. They got to find out about love and they got to find out about living.
Источник: Their Eyes Were Watching God
“No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep.”
Источник: Their Eyes Were Watching God
“She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.”
Источник: Their Eyes Were Watching God
“She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her.”
Источник: Their Eyes Were Watching God
“A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it.”
Источник: Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica
“They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.”
Источник: Their Eyes Were Watching God