Quote by Zora Neale Hurston: “Love is like the sea. It's a moving thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from the shore.”

Love is not formless — it is shaped by the people in it. Like water taking the contours of its container, love changes form depending on who is giving and receiving it. This means love is never exactly the same twice, and it is the people involved who give it its character.

Hurston published Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937, writing it in just seven weeks while conducting anthropological research in Haiti. The novel centres a Black woman's search for love and self-determination in the American South, during an era when both were systematically denied to Black women.

American novelist, anthropologist, and folklorist who documented African American folklore and culture in the rural South and Caribbean during the 1930s and 1940s. Her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is considered a masterwork of twentieth-century American literature.