Daily Inspiration Quote by Zora Neale Hurston

Anger, for Hurston, isn’t a moral failing; it’s a tool you can grip. “Grab the broom” snaps the emotion out of the abstract and into the domestic, the everyday. A broom is humble, unglamorous labor - the kind of object associated with women’s work and with keeping a house livable. Hurston turns that association into strategy: anger becomes a form of maintenance, a way to reclaim space when fear has moved in like a squatter.

The line’s real punch is its inversion of the usual self-help hierarchy. Fear is the “beast,” the thing that looms, multiplies, and dominates. Anger is not the beast; it’s the instrument. Hurston isn’t romanticizing rage as a lifestyle, she’s prescribing it as a temporary force strong enough to interrupt paralysis. Anger here reads as clarity: the body’s refusal to stay cornered. It’s the heat that gets you to act before fear can negotiate you into silence.

Context matters. Hurston wrote as a Black woman navigating Jim Crow America, the Harlem Renaissance’s politics of respectability, and the constant demand to be palatable. In that world, fear is not just private anxiety; it’s a social technology, enforced by violence and humiliation. The subtext is an insurgent permission slip: you’re allowed to feel the “improper” emotion if it helps you survive, speak, create, leave. The broom image keeps it practical and unsentimental - a swift, repetitive motion of pushing back, again and again, until the room is yours.