Sourced

• Ah done been in sorrow's kitchen and Ah done licked out all de pots. Ah done died in grief and been buried in de bitter waters, and Ah done rose agin from de dead lak Lazarus.
  • Lucy in Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), Ch. 6, p. 131, ISBN 0-060-91651-6

• Gods always behave like the people who make them.
  • Tell My Horse (1938), Ch. 15, p. 219. ISBN 0-060-91649-4

• 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.
  • "Crazy for This Democracy" in Negro Digest (December 1945)

How It Feels to Be Colored Me (1928)

"How It Feels to Be Colored Me", in The World Tomorrow (May 1928)

• I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief.

• I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to that sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world — I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

• 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?

Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

ISBN 0-252-00686-0

• Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.
  • Ch. 1, p. 9

• "Well, Ah see Mouth-Almighty is still sittin' in de same place. And Ah reckon they got me up in they mouth now."

  "Yes indeed. You know if you pass some people and don't speak tuh suit 'em dey got tuh go way back in yo' life and see whut you ever done. They know mo' 'bout yuh than you do yo' self. They done 'heard' 'bout you just what they hope done happened."

  "If God don't think no mo' 'bout 'em than Ah do, they's a lost ball in de high grass."

  • Janie and Phoeby, Ch. 1, p. 16

• There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
  • Ch. 3, p. 38

• Of course he wasn't dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.
  • Ch. 20, p. 193

Dust Tracks on a Road (1942)

ISBN 0-060-92168-4

• Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to "jump at de sun." We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.
  • Ch.2 : My Folks, p. 13

• 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.
  • Ch. 10 : Research, p. 143

• Love, I find is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much.
  • Ch. 14 : Love, p. 203