"It seems that fighting is a game where everybody is the loser"
About this Quote
A cool, wry verdict turns the language of sport inside out: call conflict a game and the crowd expects scoreboards and trophies; Hurston answers that the only reliable result is loss. The metaphor cuts at pride, the chief fuel of many quarrels. You enter a fight to defend face, territory, or certainty, but even a victory hardens the heart, drains time, and frays the ties you meant to protect. The opponent loses openly; the winner loses quietly, paying in trust, joy, and the habit of seeing others as adversaries. A game presumes rules and spectators; fighting breeds its own rules, and the audience is the community that must live with the aftermath.
Hurston knew those costs from the ground up. As an anthropologist of Black folk life and a novelist of intimate power struggles, she watched how contests for dominance flatten the human richness she loved to record. On the Eatonville porch, lively verbal play builds fellowship, but when play curdles into humiliation, everyone leaves smaller. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Jody Starks battles to control Janies voice, and the marriage becomes a grudge match in which he wins status and loses companionship, while she loses years of herself. Later, Tea Cakes jealousy and the chaos of disaster show how quickly love can turn into a fatal test of possession. No one really wins the proving.
The line also brushes against public life. Hurston distrusted grandstanding and zero-sum politics that trade mutual flourishing for symbolic triumph. She championed self-making, art, and humor as forms of strength that do not require an opponent. To call fighting a game is to expose its childish seductions; to say everybody loses is to propose a different standard of success: the capacity to create, to love, to tell stories, to live in a circle wider than the self. The grown-up move is not to play.
Hurston knew those costs from the ground up. As an anthropologist of Black folk life and a novelist of intimate power struggles, she watched how contests for dominance flatten the human richness she loved to record. On the Eatonville porch, lively verbal play builds fellowship, but when play curdles into humiliation, everyone leaves smaller. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Jody Starks battles to control Janies voice, and the marriage becomes a grudge match in which he wins status and loses companionship, while she loses years of herself. Later, Tea Cakes jealousy and the chaos of disaster show how quickly love can turn into a fatal test of possession. No one really wins the proving.
The line also brushes against public life. Hurston distrusted grandstanding and zero-sum politics that trade mutual flourishing for symbolic triumph. She championed self-making, art, and humor as forms of strength that do not require an opponent. To call fighting a game is to expose its childish seductions; to say everybody loses is to propose a different standard of success: the capacity to create, to love, to tell stories, to live in a circle wider than the self. The grown-up move is not to play.
Quote Details
| Topic | Peace |
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