"A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it"
About this Quote
Bigness, for Hurston, is not a matter of scale but of stubbornness. "A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it" takes the usual measurements of importance and flips them: what matters is what survives the erosion that is supposed to make everything smaller. Time is a solvent. Distance is an excuse. If neither can reduce something, Hurston implies, it was never fragile to begin with.
The line works because it refuses sentimentality while still making room for it. "Mighty" carries folk cadence and muscle; it sounds like spoken wisdom, not a lecture. And "shrink" is domestic, almost tactile, as if memory were fabric pulled in a wash. The image suggests that most of what we call love, grievance, pride, art, even trauma, is subject to ordinary wear. What remains unchanged after separation and years is the real weight-bearing structure of a life.
Hurston's context sharpens the point. Writing out of the Harlem Renaissance and the lived realities of Black Southern communities, she understood how narratives get minimized: by geographic removal, by historical amnesia, by polite cultural forgetting. Her work fought that shrinking impulse, insisting that vernacular language, local rituals, and complicated interior lives are not "small" subjects. As a dramatist, she also knew what plays and stories do: they test whether a feeling can cross rooms, towns, decades. If it still lands, it's mighty big.
The line works because it refuses sentimentality while still making room for it. "Mighty" carries folk cadence and muscle; it sounds like spoken wisdom, not a lecture. And "shrink" is domestic, almost tactile, as if memory were fabric pulled in a wash. The image suggests that most of what we call love, grievance, pride, art, even trauma, is subject to ordinary wear. What remains unchanged after separation and years is the real weight-bearing structure of a life.
Hurston's context sharpens the point. Writing out of the Harlem Renaissance and the lived realities of Black Southern communities, she understood how narratives get minimized: by geographic removal, by historical amnesia, by polite cultural forgetting. Her work fought that shrinking impulse, insisting that vernacular language, local rituals, and complicated interior lives are not "small" subjects. As a dramatist, she also knew what plays and stories do: they test whether a feeling can cross rooms, towns, decades. If it still lands, it's mighty big.
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