Allison

“We brought up issues that concerned us as young feminists and womanists. Was Janie Crawford a good female role model or was she solely defined by the men in her life? Many of us argued that Janie did not have to be a role model at all. She simply had to be a fully realized and complex character, which she was.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening

“The phrase comes from that treasury of literary titles, Ecclesiastes, 7:4: “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“It is this urge that resonates in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Beloved, and in Walker’s depiction of Hurston as our prime symbol of “racial health—a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings, a sense that is lacking in so much black writing and literature.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God