Quote by Zora Neale Hurston: “Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.”

Research is not cold or mechanical — it grows from the same human impulse as a child's questions. The difference is that it channels curiosity with intention and method. This reframes intellectual inquiry as something alive and driven by genuine wonder rather than dry obligation.

Hurston wrote this in her 1942 autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road. She was working at the intersection of literature and anthropology at a time when Black scholars and writers were largely excluded from mainstream academic and literary institutions, pursuing her field research with self-taught determination.

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.