Quote by Zora Neale Hurston: “Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.”

The things we most long for always seem possible when they are far away. Distance makes dreams seem real because we never have to test them. Hurston opens her novel with this image to say that most people spend their lives chasing a horizon that keeps receding — and the tragedy is accepting that drift as fate.

Their Eyes Were Watching God was published in 1937, but Hurston's autobiographical Dust Tracks on a Road appeared in 1942, during the Second World War. The Harlem Renaissance had declined, and Hurston was increasingly out of step with the dominant mood of Black political writing, which she resisted throughout her career.

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.