Alice Walker Quotes

Shug say, What, too shamefaced to put singing and dancing and fucking together? She laugh. That’s th...

For several years, while I searched for, found, and studied black women writers, I deliberately shut...

I believe that the truth of any subject only comes when all sides of the story are put together.

If this were a courageous country,it would ask Gloria to lead itsince she is sane and funny and beau...

Surely the earth can be savedby all the peoplewho insiston love.

Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh pe...

On Stripping Bark from Myself(for Jane, who said trees die from it)Because women are expected to kee...

When I no longer have your heartI will not request your bodyyour presenceor even your polite convers...

The crushed teapot in the rubbish of the bulldozed house will sing in your ears forever.

Women have to summon up courage to fulfill dormant dreams.

I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you unders...

Propaganda is amazing. People can be led to believe anything.

I have learned not to worry about love but to honor its coming with all my heart.

This is a wonderful planet, and it is being completely destroyed by people who have too much money a...

How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.

Men make war to get attention. All killing is an expression of self-hate.

I think 'The Color Purple' is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the nee...

I understood at a very early age that in nature, I felt everything I should feel in church but never...

I live a very secluded life, a very contemplative life and a very meditative one. That is my ideal l...

You know how big love is? Love is big. love can hold anger love can even hold hatred.

In South Korea, they believe that when you turn 60, you've become a baby again and the rest of your ...

The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one's people that has not previou...

No person is your friend who demands your silence or denies your right to grow.

I'm not convinced that women have the education or the sense of their own history enough or that the...

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

I don't call myself a Buddhist. I'm a free spirit. I believe I'm here on earth to admire and enjoy i...

As long as the people don't fear the truth, there is hope. For once they fear it, the one who tells ...

Life is abundant, and life is beautiful. And it's a good place that we're all in, you know, on this ...

And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative sp...

As long as the Earth can make a spring every year I can. As long as the Earth can flower and produc...

For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn't poetry. And then I realized that the e...

Once us feel loved by God, us do the best us can to please him with what us like.

What that song? I ast. Sound low down dirty to me. Like what the preacher tells you its sin to hear....

If we want to fight people in the world, we should fight them with pillows - pillows stuffed with fo...

Horses make a landscape look beautiful.

Howard Zinn was magical as a teacher. Witty, irreverent, and wise, he loved what he was teaching and...

The mountain of despair has dwindled, and the stone of hope has size and shape, and can be fondled b...

Hope to sin only in the service of waking up.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can writ...

All her young life she has tried to please her father, never quite realizing that, as a girl, she ne...

Even as I hold youI think of you as someone gonefar, far away. Your eyes the colorof pennies in a bo...

Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.

If you're silent for a long time, people just arrive in your mind.

Every small positive change we make in ourselves repays us in confidence in the future.

There is a way that the men speak to women that reminds me too much of Pa. They listen just long eno...

The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate.

The Nature of This Flower is to bloom.

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.

When the ax came into the forest the trees said the handle is one of us.

Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.

Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.

'Thank you' is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extr...

For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle; and one faces down fears of today so that t...

You think you can avoid [pain,] but you actually can't. If you do, you just get sicker, or you feel ...

In search of my mother's garden, I found my own.

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways,...

Long as I can spell G-o-d I got somebody along.

One of the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement is that when you travel through the South today, yo...

They be marching hand in hand, like going to war.

Most damage that others do us is out of fear, humiliation and pain. Those feelings occur in all of u...

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.

I made my first white women friends in college; they loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but ...

War contributes greatly to global warming, which shouldn't surprise us. All those bombs going off, a...

The experience of God or in any case the possibility of experiencing God is innate.

It is justice and respect that I want the world to dust off and put - without delay, and with tender...

Dear Nettie, I don't write to God no more, I write to you.

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than bl...

Our mothers and our grandmothers some of them: moving to music not yet written.

It is healthier in any case to write for the adults one's children will become than for the childr...

Creation is a sustained period of bliss, even though the subject can still be very sad. Because ther...

All History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world.

Is solace anywhere more comforting than in the arms of sisters?

Expect nothing. Live frugallyOn surprise.become a strangerTo need of pityOr, if compassion be freely...

If you want to have a life that is worth living, a life that expresses your deepest feelings and emo...

Don't wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you've got to make you...

Even as I hold you, I am letting you go.

The absence of models, in literature as in life, to say nothing of painting, is an occupational haza...

When it is all too much; when the news is so bad meditation itself feels useless, and a single life ...

Clearly older women and especially older women who have led an active life or elder women who succes...

Part of our tradition as black women is that we are universalists. Black children, yellow children, ...

But I don't know how to fight. All I know how to do is stay alive.

What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears.

Those in power must spend a lot of their time laughing at us.

The infinite faith I have in people's ability to understand anything that makes sense has always bee...

The three wealthiest people in the world own more than the GDP of forty-eight countries!

Peace": the fruit of justice done especially to the Self.

Why should the killers of the world be "the future" and not us?

You are all talking a bit too much, said Armando, who had cautioned them from the beginning to stay ...

The life of my people is to remember forever; each head granary is full. The life of your people is ...

First time I got the full sight of Shug Avery long black body with it black plum nipples, look like ...

And I don't believe you dead. How can you be dead if I still feel you? Maybe, like God, you changed ...

I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering bout the big things and ...

It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That's how I come...

But it ain't easy, trying to do without God even if you know he ain't there, trying to do without hi...

Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.

But what was good tween us must have been nothing but bodies, she say. Cause I don't know the Albert...

Hard times' is a phrase the English love to use, when speaking of Africa. And it is easy to forget t...

She got a long pointed nose and big fleshy mouth. Lips look like black plum. Eyes big, glossy. Fever...

You telling me God love you, and you ain't never done nothing for him? I mean, not go to church, sin...

He beat me when you not here, I say.Who do, she say, Albert?Mr ____, I say.I can't believe it, she s...

Listen, God love everything you love - and a mess of stuff you don't. But more than anything else, G...