The celebrated author and activist Alice Walker is renowned for her powerful words on love, resilience, race, and womanhood. Through her novels, essays, and poetry, Walker has inspired countless individuals with her ability to confront difficult truths while fostering hope and empowerment. Alice Walker quotes often resonate with those seeking wisdom on overcoming adversity, embracing self-love, and advocating for justice.
This blog post will explore some of the most memorable Alice Walker quotes, inspiring and enlightening people worldwide.
Alice Walker Quotes
- The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.
2. Whenever I have knocked, a door has opened. Wherever I have wandered, a path has appeared. I have been helped, supported, encouraged and nurtured by people of all races, creeds, colors and dreams.
3. “As long as the Earth can make a spring every year, I can.
As long as the Earth can flower and produce nurturing fruit, I can, because I’m the Earth. I won’t give up until the Earth gives up.”
4. Writing about people helps us to understand them, and understanding them helps us to accept them as part of ourselves.
5. Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.
6. As I get older, I realize that the thing I value the most is good-heartedness.
7. America is not nearly done. We’re only in the beginning. Who knows who we will be? Who knows… what color we will be? It is all something that, maybe, our descendants – if they survive that long – will see.
8. It’s so important to unclutter the mind. For me, creativity is greatly impeded just by the chatter and visual clutter of life. It’s really important to have a space that is really clear for whatever is emerging to come.
9. A grown child is a dangerous thing.
10. Fiction is such a world of freedom, it’s wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.
11. What I’ve seen from keeping in touch as well as I can is that what I find so typical in Mexican culture is the helpfulness of the people to each other. I think, at this point, that is the highest good and the highest we can hope for – which is to be of help and use to each other wherever we are.
12. What a burden to think one is conceived in sin rather than in pleasure; that one is born into evil rather than into joy.
13. I’ve found, in my own writing, that a little hatred, keenly directed, is a useful thing.
14. I always have felt that elders are really important. I think it’s because, in my little Southern black culture, elders really were respected. Everybody listened to them. They may not have agreed – that’s a whole different story – but they would totally listen and consider what the elder had to say.
15. War contributes greatly to global warming, which shouldn’t surprise us. All those bombs going off, all those rockets, all those planes and helicopters. All that fuel of various kinds being used. It pollutes the air and water of this very fragile and interconnected planet.
16. You a low down dog is what’s wrong. It’s time to leave you and enter into the creation. And your dead body just the welcome mat I need.
17. In a way, no matter who’s in charge of the corporation that the United States is, the direction in which it is taken seems to be inexorable. So, you just get the job of being the front man for four or eight years. Now, most people realize that’s what you are.
18. I think colors are miraculous. We live in a universe that is extremely creative and magical. We become happier as we appreciate these things in nature.
19. The quietly pacifist peaceful always die to make room for men who shout.
20. Critics don’t really affect the fact that we live in this paradise and what the meaning of that [is]. And what luck to have this!
21. We’re going to have to debunk the myth that Africa is a heaven for black people — especially black women. We’ve been the mule of the world there and the mule of the world here.
22. Writing poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before.
23. Honestly, that is the most important thing to me: Can I continue to live up to my own expectations of myself – and not fall back into slacking?
24. Odinary people don’t have a feeling of being loved by the people who manage to get into positions of leadership. They get in there, they make a lot of money, and then they play games with us.
25. The forest is the first cathedral. I felt that from the time I was a child. I credit my mother with that. I used to think it came from her Native-American side. Whichever it was, she instinctively connected with nature, and taught me that.
26. My life is not to be somebody else’s impact – you know what I mean?
27. ‘Thank you’ is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.
28. Time moves slowly, but passes quickly.
29. Surely the earth can be saved by all the people who insist on love.
30. I don’t require myself or anyone to go beyond what they feel they can do. I just do suggest – for their own eventual happiness – that they go as far as they can. They can usually go much further than they think.
31. You can just keep going and going and going, and you never get to the end of it because there is no end. The ending is a beginning. If you feel like that, then you accept that wherever you have to stop on this journey, you continue in some other form somewhere else.
32. I think the foundation of everything in my life is wonder.
33. Israel is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people, both inside Israel and also in the Occupied Territories.
34. Not only will your teachers appear, but they will cook new foods for you.
35. For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle; and one faces down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged.
36. Horses make a landscape look beautiful.
37. HELPED are those who lose their fear of death; theirs is the power to envision the future in a blade of grass.
38. Always with me was the inner twin: my true nature, my true self. It is timeless, free, compassionate and in love with whatever is natural to me
39. Activism pays the rent on being alive and being here on the planet.
40. HELPED are those who are shown the existence of the Creator’s magic in the Universe; they shall experience delight and astonishment without ceasing.
41. In my work and in myself I reflect black people, women and men, as I reflect others. One day even the most self-protective ones will look into the mirror I provide and not be afraid.
42. ‘Thank you’ is the best prayer that anyone could say.
43. Our problem mostly in our abuse of each other and the planet is greed. Just the rampant, incredible greed that people have partly because they’re empty and they can’t get enough because they’re – you know, it’s that Buddhist thing about the hungry ghost with the little mouth and the big belly.
44. The animals of the planet are in desperate peril… Without free animal life I believe we will lose the spiritual equivalent of oxygen.
45. My ancestors make up the skin of the world. That’s who that is. That’s what that is. That’s us.
46. HELPED are those whose every act is a prayer for peace; on them depends the future of the world.
47. The hardest part is when you’re in danger yourself. You have to face what could happen and might be likely to happen to you. It’s not just that you’re there standing next to somebody that something bad is likely to happen to. That is a true moment of reckoning with who you really are.
48. I’m not convinced that women have the education or the sense of their own history enough or that they understand the cruelty of which men are capable and the delight that many men will take in seeing you choose to chain yourself – then they get to say ‘See, you did it yourself.’
49. As you know from school, it’s when you have not prepared for the test that you have the fear of failing. And if you have prepared, even if you fail, you’ve done your best.
50. Every time I conjure up a rock, I throw it.
51. Whenever you are creating beauty around you, you are restoring your own soul.
52. People who work hard often work too hard. … May we learn to honor the hammock, the siesta, the nap and the pause in all its forms.
53. The most important question in the world is, ‘Why is the child crying?’
54. I loved meditation. I love it because that’s where you find what your voice is. You cannot really find it easily in this culture. This culture is the noisiest culture ever, ever. I think the damage that it has done to people is in that realm of silencing them. They are overwhelmed by gadgets. They don’t know what to think because they’re so heavily programmed about what it is that they should want and should think.
55. Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.
56. The world has changed: it did not change without your prayers without your faith without your determination to believe in liberation and kindness; without your dancing through the years that had no beat.
57. Just be what it is that you are, and that is just fine. You don’t have to be what you’re not in any way. Live that and live that fully, and that is where you discover ecstasy. You can’t really have ecstasy as something other than yourself
58. I’m not [a Buddhist]. The whole point of anything that is really, truly valuable to your soul, and your own growth, is not to attach to a teacher, but rather to find out what the real deal is in the world itself. You become your own guide. The teachings can help you, but really, we’re all here with the opportunity the reality of hereness. We all have that. I trust that…I’m just not interested in labels. I find all of them constrictive. They’re hard to wear. And they’re hard to wear because we’re always – hopefully – growing.
59. The harm that you do to others is the harm that you do to yourself and you cannot think then that you can cause wars in other parts of the world and destroy people and drone them without this having a terrible impact on your own soul and your own consciousness.
60. We will be ourselves and free, or die in the attempt. Harriet Tubman was not our great-grandmother for nothing.
61. As for those who think the Arab world promises freedom, the briefest study of its routine traditional treatment of blacks (slavery) and women (purdah) will provide relief from all illusion. If Malcolm X had been a black woman his last message to the world would have been entirely different. The brotherhood of Moslem men-all colors-may exist there, but part of the glue that holds them together is the thorough suppression of women.
62. Before I embark on any new venture, I ask myself: will the joy of doing this make me lose track of any concern for time? If the answer is yes, I proceed!
63. I feel very happy to be living in Berkeley because there are a lot of people who are politically active here.
64. It’s so clear that you have to cherish everyone. I think that’s what I get from these older black women, that every soul is to be cherished, that every flower Is to bloom.
65. What gardening teaches us is that if you plant things, they’ll come up. But you have to be willing to wait for them to bear fruit because things are seasonal.
66. Yoga means to bind back, unite. To bring the body and the soul together. For this reason the practice of yoga is a holy endeavor and the teaching of it to our people a very high calling.
67. Language is an intrinsic part of who we are and what has, for good or evil, happened to us.
68. For a long time, I thought I was ugly and disfigured. This made me shy and timid, and I often reacted to insults that were not intended.
69. The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn’t want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass.
70. I’m pore, I’m black, I may be ugly and can’t cook, a voice say to everything listening. But I’m here.
71. This life soon be over, I say. Heaven last all ways.
72. I grew up in the South [USA states] under segregation. I know what terrorism feels like – when your father could be taken out in the middle of the night and lynched just because he didn’t look like he was in an obeying frame of mind when a white person said something he must do. That’s terrorism, too.
73. America is America. It’s a capitalist system. They [leaders] have enshrined that belief that profit matters more than anything else. The polarization of the society is just the resurfacing of that.
74. To acknowledge our ancestors means we are aware that we did not make ourselves, that the line stretches all the way back, perhaps to God; or to Gods. We remember them because it is an easy thing to forget: that we are not the first to suffer, rebel, fight, love and die. The grace with which we embrace life, in spite of the pain, the sorrow, is always a measure of what has gone before.
75. Being happy is not the only happiness.
76. Every soul is to be cherished, every flower is to bloom.
77. It is chilling to think that the same people who persecuted the wise women and men of Europe, its midwives and healers, then crossed the oceans to Africa and the Americas and tortured and enslaved, raped, impoverished, and eradicated the peaceful, Christ-like people they found. And that the blueprint from which they worked, and still work, was the Bible.
78. You can’t truly have an open heart until it’s been broken.
79. Men make war to get attention. All killing is an expression of self-hate.
80. It’s essential that we understand that taking care of the planet will be done as we take care of ourselves. You know that you can’t really make much of a difference in things until you change yourself.
81. Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.
82. I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you’ve found It.
83. If you’re silent for a long time, people just arrive in your mind.
84. Now there are heavy houses everywhere and more of them are being built. In fact, it is only when more houses are being constructed that some countries consider their economics healthy. Yet each house is a heavy footprint on the Earth. Just as all our possessions represent-if we cannot learn ways of sharing them-a weight and clutter that often means the faces of future generations will look up into darkness and the pressure on the Earth of “things.”
85. HELPED are those who love all the colors of all the human beings, as they love all the colors of the animals and plants; none of their children, nor any of their ancestors, nor any parts of themselves, shall be hidden from them.
86. It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one’s children will become than for the children one’s ‘mature’ critics often are.
87. To know is to exist; to exist is to be involved, to move about, to see the world with my own eyes.
88. One white man on the platform in South Carolina asked us where we were going–we had got off the train to get some fresh air and to dust the grit and dust out of our clothes. When we said Africa he looked offended and tickled too. Niggers going to Africa, he said to his wife. Now I have seen everything.
89. The good news may be that Nature is phasing out the white man, but the bad news is that’s who She thinks we all are.
90. I think if I could not get myself off my cushion, off my couch, or away from whatever I’m eating – or drinking or partying or whatever – if I couldn’t get away from that, I would have a heavy heart.
91. Whoever you are, whatever you are, start with that, whether salt of the earth or only white sugar.
92. What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers’ time? In our great-grandmothers’ day? It is an answer cruel enough to stop the blood.
93. We have elders who [are] misguided and wallowing around in troughs of money with the wrong sort. They’re not really good elders for the youth to emulate. The youth rightly don’t like them.
94. In our particular society, it is the narrowed and narrowing view of life that often wins.
95. There is no graceful way to carry hatred.
96. Love yourself. Just love yourself. In fact, the love of the self cures every kind of problem you have with yourself. For instance, if someone calls you nappy-headed, it rolls right off your body, if you love nappy hair. Or if someone calls you buck-toothed or too black, that won’t be a problem if you love being buck-toothed or black. If you love it, then so what. The development of self-love cures many of the ills that people suffer from.
97. I think writing really helps you heal yourself. I think if you write long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write, as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame.
98. Propaganda is amazing, people can be led to believe anything.
99. Women have to summon courage to fulfill dormant dreams.
100. My writing is very organic. It’s what I am. My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig. So I think of it as something that’s very essential to my being.
101. Sexuality is one of the ways that we become enlightened, actually, because it leads us to self-knowledge.
102. War is a dead end, literally. And, what is more, we simply can’t afford it. Not morally, and not financially. How long will it take the citizens of the United States, one wonders, to recognize that the house their country bombed in Iraq is the same one they were living in until it was foreclosed?
103. Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week.
104. How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.
105. HELPED are those who love the entire cosmos rather than their own tiny country, city, or farm, for to them will be shown the unbroken web of life and the meaning of infinity.
106. What hurts the most is being misunderstood. They tell me that’s an Aquarian trait – that that’s the thing we don’t like.
107. It is natural to want to have a future.
108. My God is not a religious God. My God is nature, my God is everything there is. That’s God. Everything is God. I’m a child of that.
109. Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.
110. I’m the most stubborn person I know.
111. Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence – as it saves most writers who live in ‘interesting’ oppressive times and are not afflicted by personal immunity.
112. The world is changing. It is no longer a world just for boys and men.
113. God is different to us now, after all these years in Africa. More spirit than ever before, and more internal. Most people think he has to look like something or someone- a roofleaf or Christ- but we don’t. And not being tied to what God looks like, frees us.
114. I come from somewhere and from specific black people in the South, including my parents, who built our first school, and rebuilt it after it was burned to the ground. And they used to bake pies and cakes to raise money to keep it going. So, I learned to struggle from a very early way in a way that was truly indigenous to the South.
115. I don’t need a certain number of friends, just a number of friends I can be certain of.
116. In every life there comes a point when you have to make a decision about how you will live.
117. Criticism is painful when it’s not done with love.
118. No matter how hidden the cruelty, no matter how far off the screams of pain and terror, we live in one world. We are one people.
119. So the best thing is to really work on yourself and opening your own heart and just letting all that stuff [worrying] go. And it is possible. It’s sometimes takes a lot of time; it’s not easy. And a lot of sitting with yourself and trying to work with your own heart.
120. Many people are aware that we are in peril and that there is no trustworthy leadership.
121. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.
122. Our mothers and grandmothers … moving to music not yet written.
123. People are called ‘stars’ not only because they shine… because the qualities they exemplify are… eternal. We are attracted to their sparkle, their warmth, their light, but they will be forever distant from us. So distant we can never quite believe our inseparability. Never quite believe that we are also composed of the light they have.
124. Howard Zinn was magical as a teacher. Witty, irreverent, and wise, he loved what he was teaching and clearly wanted his students to love it, also.
125. …there is no resistance to the idea that what is foreign can be known. Can be understood. Can be held in the embrace of love that holds the Universe. Given this Earth on which we live and grow, given its beauty and generosity, its majesty and comfort, how can one doubt that one is loved? That in fact there is an abundance, not a scarcity of love? It is all anyone ever wants, really, I believe, and it is all around us as we starve.
126. You must run around like a crazy person or walk sedately honoring the dead.
127. I’m entirely interested in people, and also other creatures and beings, but especially in people, and I tend to read them by emotional field more than anything. So I have a special interest in what they’re thinking and who they are and who’s hiding behind those eyes and how did he get there, and what’s the story, really?
128. Expecting anything, living frugally in surprise.
129. How sad now never to see men holding hands, while everywhere one looks they are holding guns.
130. Just because I don’t harass it like some peoples us know don’t mean I ain’t got religion.
131. I’m for women choosing whatever they want to do but they have to really know what they are doing.
132. Love likes to extend itself. If you receive it in a book – or however you get it – then your duty is to extend it beyond.
133. I started writing as a child. But I didn’t think of myself, actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something, no maybe junior and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.
134. Human compassion is equal to human cruelty, and it is up to each of us to tip the balance.
135. A burnt finger remember the fire.
136. War will stop when we no longer praise it, or give it any attention at all. Peace will come wherever it is sincerely invited.
137. Any God I ever found in church, I brought in myself.
138. Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.
139. My heart hurt so much I can’t believe it. How can it keep beating, feeling like this?
140. (a womanist) Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself. Regardless.
141. I’m sure we, the American people, are the butt of jokes by those in power.
142. it is this broken road with pitfalls and sharp turns and unexpected traverses that has brought me joy and adventure.
143. HELPED are those whose ever act is a prayer for harmony in the Universe, for they are the restorers of balance to our planet. To them will be given the insight that every good act done anywhere in the cosmos welcomes the life of an animal or a child.
144. I am not convinced that men and women were ever meant to share the same house, though some people can do it beautifully.
145. My parents taught me service – not by saying, but by doing. That was my culture, the culture of my family.
146. I love my own culture. I love my African-American culture very deeply, and I know it deserves to be honored. You have to be aware that people are suffering unjustly, and given our own history we have a duty to stand for the people who are being treated like our parents and grandparents and children were treated.
147. Some colored people so scared of whitefolks they claim to love the cotton gin.
148. That is scary, when you consider what we’re doing to children all over the planet. They’re the ones who are truly being terrorized by all the madness adults are perpetrating.
149. Books became my world because the world I was in was very hard.
150. I could never live happily in Africa-or anywhere else-until I could live freely in Mississippi.
151. Look closely at the present you are constructing: it should look like the future you are dreaming.
152. Be compassionate to everyone. Don’t just search for whatever it is that annoys and frightens you-see beyond those things to the basic human being. Especially see the child in the man or woman. Even if they are destroying you, allow a moment to see how lost in their own delusion and suffering they are.
153. Anything we love can be saved.
154. It’s almost unbelievable where we are as a planet because people have been so afraid of rocking the boat, of putting forth what they really believe, and standing with people who need to be stood with.
155. … my mother adorned with flowers whatever shabby house we were forced to live in.
156. I see children, all children, as humanity’s most precious resource, because it will be to them that the care of the planet will always be left.
157. The long-term accommodation that protects marriage and other such relationships is … forgetfulness.
158. As an elder of the Americas and of the rest of the planet, it is my responsibility to care for and protect, to the best of my ability, the young.
159. I’m one in what I do and what I say and what I believe.
160. And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see – or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.
161. I don’t focus on criticism. I prefer to praise people and the world, rather than criticize them and it.
162. When you are active, and you must know this so well, that the more you are active, the more you see, the more you go to see. You know, you are curious. One thing leads to another thing, and it gets deeper and deeper, too. And there’s no end to it.
163. …have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.
164. Helped are those too busy living to respond when they are wrongfully attacked: on their walks they shall find mysteries so intriguing as to distract them from every blow.
165. I don’t know nothing, I think. And glad of it.
166. Meditation is like the cloak of the good thief. You find a corner or somewhere where you can actually entertain your own self and your own soul, and understand what your work [is] here.
167. Animals were not made for us, or our use. They have their own use, which is just being who they are.
168. What the mind doesn’t understand, it worships or fears.
169. Hard times require furious dancing. Each of us is proof.
170. If I could live as a tree, as a river, as the moon, as the sun, as a star, as the earth, as a rock, I would. …Writing permits me to experience life as any number of strange creations.
171. She say, Celie, tell the truth, have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show.
172. All History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world.
173. I think America has always been polarized… It’s a racist country and it has always been.
174. You are saying, are you not, I said to Manuelito, that stories have more room in them than ideas? […] He laughed. That is correct, Señor. It is as if ideas are made of blocks. Rigid and hard. And stories are made of a gauze that is elastic. You can almost see through it, so what is beyond is tantalizing. You can’t quite make it out; and because the imagination is always moving forward, you yourself are constantly stretching. Stories are the way spirit is exercised.
175. Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength – in search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.
176. Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors.
177. You can love yourself spiritually, physically-in almost any way that anybody else can.
178. Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?
179. I think I’ve actually returned to a kind of realism about how the world works. That’s helpful. Because in a way, no matter who’s in charge of the corporation that the United States is, the direction in which it is taken seems to be inexorable. So, you just get the job of being the front man for four or eight years. Now, most people realize that’s what you are.
180. People tend to think that life really does progress for everyone eventually, that people progress, but actually only some people progress. The rest of the people don’t.
181. Abortion is an act of self-defense.
182. The Congo is really beautiful. People correct me and say, “Oh, you mean the Democratic Republic of the Congo.” Well, fine. But, the land there, the landscape is extraordinary. It’s big lakes and beautiful hills and trees.
183. Healing begins where the wound was made.
184. Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening…Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.
185. You must learn to love only that which cannot be stolen.
186. HELPED are those who laugh with a pure heart; theirs will be the company of the jolly righteous.
187. Clearly older women and especially older women who have led an active life or elder women who successfully maneuver through their own family life have so much to teach us about sharing, patience, and wisdom.
188. What you hope for, you also fear.
189. Be nobody’s darling; Be an outcast. Take the contradictions Of your life And wrap around You like a shawl, To parry stones To keep you warm. Watch the people succumb To madness With ample cheer; Let them look askance at you And you askance reply. Be an outcast; Be pleased to walk alone (Uncool) Or line the crowded River beds With other impetuous Fools. Make a merry gathering On the bank Where thousands perished For brave hurt words They said. Be nobody’s darling; Be an outcast. Qualified to live Among your dead.
190. I just really love people a lot. I really love them.
191. Laughter isn’t even the other side of tears. It is tears turned inside out. Truly the suffering is great, here on earth.
192. Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.
193. Curiosity is my natural state and has led me headlong into every worthwhile experience (never mind the others) I have ever had.
194. I don’t call myself a Buddhist. I’m a free spirit. I believe I’m here on earth to admire and enjoy it; that’s my religion.
195. You’re not here just to be a clone. You’re not here to be a copy. We have enough of those. You don’t have to apply. You don’t even have to go there to be absolutely yourself – real, here, now, on this planet.
196. There’s an ecstatic side to writing. It’s like jazz. It just has a life.
197. You don’t really stay attached to things. Life goes on, so you don’t really sit around and think about how they are relevant to other people. You hope that whatever you create will be [relevant].
198. Helped are those who are content to be themselves; they will never lack mystery in their lives and the joys of self-discovery will be constant.
199. Not everyone’s life is what they make it. Some people’s life is what other people make it.
200. I love us so incredibly, insanely deeply; it’s almost unbearable to see what we do to ourselves.
201. She thought of how precious it was to be able to know another person over many years. There was incomparable richness in it.
202. I think the War on Terror is really absurd, especially coming from a country that is founded on terrorism.
203. You die – and this is why manmade religions don’t work for so many of us. The notion that you’re dead and that’s the end, and they even try to contain you in coffins. They make them out of steel and stuff. But really, your journey – for all you know – is just beginning. For all I know, what you see now is just a tiny little seed. So, I may blossom into an entire – I don’t know – something in the sky. Who knows where we’re going?
204. HELPED are those who live in quietness, knowing neither brand name nor fad; they shall live every day as if in eternity, and each moment shall be as full as it is long.
205. Artists are messengers whose responsibility is to unite the world — a faith that will lead not to destruction but to transformation.
206. The earth is wise. It has given itself into the keeping of all, and all are therefore accountable.
207. The original crime of niggers and lesbians is that they prefer themselves.
208. But if by some miracle and all our struggle, the earth is spared, only justice to every living being will save humankind.
209. Expect nothing, live frugally on surprise. Become a stranger to need of pity. Or if compassion be freely given out, take only enough. Stop short of the urge to plead, then purge away the need. Wish for nothing larger than your own small heart or greater than a star. Tame wild disappointment with caress, unmoved and cold. Make of it a parka for your soul. Discover the reason why so tiny human midget exists at all, so scared and so unwise. But expect nothing, live frugally on surprise.
210. I realized I was a country person – I’m just not used to small spaces.
211. Love is big; love can hold anger, love can even hold hatred. It’s about the intention of what you want it to do.
212. Storytelling is how we survive, when there’s no feed, the story feeds something, it feeds the spirit, the imagination. I can’t imagine life without stories, stories from my parents, my culture. Stories from other people’s parents, their culture. That’s how we learn from each other, it’s the best way. That’s why literature is so important, it connects us heart to heart.
213. I think mothers and daughters are meant to give birth to each other, over and over; that is why our challenges to each other are so fierce; that is why, when love and trust have not been too badly blemished or destroyed, the teaching and learning one from the other is so indelible and bittersweet. We daughters must risk losing the only love we instinctively feel we can’t live without in order to be who we are, and I am convinced this sends a message to our mothers to break their own chains, though they may be anchored in prehistory and attached to their own great grandmothers’ hearts.
214. The earth is for joy, and dancing is a big part of that. And you dance with nature. Nature is always dancing. If you’re not harassing it and killing it and mutilating it, nature is dancing. That’s what the leaves are doing when the wind blows through them. We live in a magical wonderful universe. And just spoil it while thinking we can at some point go to heaven or some other planet.
215. My activism really is for myself, because I see places in the world where I feel I should be. If there is something really bad, really evil, happening somewhere, then that is where I should be. I need, for myself, to feel that I have stood there. It feels a lot better than just watching it on television.
216. I can spend two hours grubbing about in my garden, dazed with pleasure and intent, and it feels like five minutes.
217. I personally have never trusted museums. … It is because museums, broadly speaking, live off of the art and artifacts of others, often art and artifacts that have been obtained by dubious means. But they also manipulate whatever it is they present to the public; hence, until Judy Chicago, in the 1970s … few women artists were hung in any major museum. Indian artists? Artifacts only, please. Black artists? Something musical, maybe? And so forth.
218. Oh, Celie, unbelief is a terrible thing. And so is the hurt we cause others unknowingly.
219. All my life I had to fight. I had to fight my daddy. I had to fight my uncles. I had to fight my brothers. Girl, child ain’t safe in a family of men, but I ain’t never thought I had to fight in my own house. I loves Harpo. God knows I do. But I’ll kill him dead before I let him beat me.
220. Helped are those who forgive; their reward shall be forgetfulness of every evil done to them. It will be in their power, therefore, to envision the new Earth. —–“The Gospel According to Shug
221. I know what I’m thinking bout, I think. Nothing. And as much of it as I can.
222. If she come, I be happy. If she don’t, I be content.
223. I’m not being disrespectful of the medium; it’s just not as important as the work that I actually do [books].
224. I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.
225. I’m mad about the waste that happens when people who love each other can’t even bring themselves to talk.
226. Ignorance, arrogance, and racism have bloomed as Superior Knowledge in all too many universities.
227. Activism is my rent for living on the planet.
228. Everything is already perfect. And if you can accept that everything is already perfect, the imperfection is a part of the perfection. What’s to worry about?
229. Well, capitalism is a big problem, because with capitalism you’re just going to keep buying and selling things until there’s nothing else to buy and sell, which means gobbling up the planet.
230. My big complaint with myself is that I get tired. But, I forgive myself because it’s human to get tired. But, I didn’t always feel like I could forgive myself. There’s a certain [drive], I think. But, now I feel like, “OK, you can be tired. People should let you be tired. Then you should go and take a nap, and you should sleep.” That’s about it.
231. All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.
232. Eventually I knew what hair wanted; it wanted to be itself … to be left alone by anyone, including me, who did not love it as it was.
233. If a person is hit hard enough, even if she stands, she falls.
234. Even now, I find that no matter what has happened, I still have that trust. I have a lot of trust, that people can be better than they are.
235. I feel that all you can do is give it your absolute best with whatever gifts the universe has given you. And if you make it in some way that other people can recognize, that’s fine. But even if you don’t quote-unquote make it, you’re fine, if you’ve given it your whole heart and soul. You’re totally in sync with your purpose and with the universe. And that’s fine.
236. Don’t wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you’ve got to make yourself.
237. Healing cannot be done by settling a score.
238. Part of what confuses people in times of upheaval is that you’re getting so many different points of view and directions and so and so, how to do this and do that. And a lot of it is written in a language that honestly most people cannot understand.
239. To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.
240. Creation is a sustained period of bliss, even though the subject can still be very sad. Because there’s the triumph of coming through and understanding that you have, and that you did it the way only you could do it. You didn’t do it the way somebody told you to do it. You did it just the way you had to do it, and that is what makes us us.
241. I can be almost terminally grief-stricken because things are so dire, but at the same, there’s a real lightheartednes s about just the recoverability of life, of how things change, how they’re not the same, ever again.
242. In search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.
243. Creation is a sustained period of bliss.
244. I think I’m led by spirit. I think I’m led by a sense of what is right and what feels good to me – what I accept, what is joyful, what is positive. I see my mission, in a way, as carrying that forward – not so much by preaching, but by embodiment.
245. How anyone cannot see that Nature is God is amazing to me: that they’d rather worship something that can only exist, really, in their own minds.
246. I feel like to be where you need to be – where you know you need to be – is such a high. What could be better?
247. I am an expression of the divine, just like a peach is, just like a fish is. I have a right to be this way…I can’t apologize for that, nor can I change it, nor do I want to… We will never have to be other than who we are in order to be successful…We realize that we are as ourselves unlimited and our experiences valid. It is for the rest of the world to recognize this, if they choose.
248. I have a lot of faith in us. I have a lot of faith in humanity. It’s based, though, on my own life; I’ve come too far to be a pessimist.
249. I think that indigenous women’s wisdom is crucial. So much of the care of the Earth has come from the mothers. I think it’s imperative we turn to their wisdom in how to take care of the planet.
250. What I am really interested in is that I want people to be thinking in other ways – to stop thinking they have to remain glued to a system that has failed and to ideas about society that’s necessarily about being run by Democrats or Republicans.
251. I think that wealthy white people would like to have a country that resembles the Fifties, when all the minorities were tucked away in ghettos and paid in very low wages but on the surface it was very bright and shiny and free and the rest of the world would look on it longingly.
252. I love the natural world – it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved.
253. But I don’t know how to fight. All I know how to do is stay alive.
254. But it ain’t easy, trying to do without God even if you know he ain’t there, trying to do without him is a strain
255. The sight of a Black nun strikes their sentimentality; and, as I am unalterably rooted in native ground, they consider me a work of primitive art, housed in a magical color; the incarnation of civilized, anti-heathenism, and the fruit of a triumphing idea.
256. Dear God…I have always been a good girl. Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me.
257. Activism is the rent I pay for living on this planet.
258. We should learn to accept that change is truly the only thing that’s going on always, and learn to ride with it and enjoy it.
259. Nature has created us with the capacity to know God, to experience God.
260. How we come into this world, how we are ushered in, met, and hopefully embraced upon arrival, impacts the whole of our time on earth.
261. Abortion, for many women, is more than an experience of suffering beyond anything most men will ever know, it is an act of mercy, and an act of self-defense.
262. The Animals of the planet are in desperate peril and they are fully aware of this. No less than human beings are doing in all parts of the world, they are seeking sanctuary.
263. I just like to have words that describe things correctly. Now to me, ‘black feminist’ does not do that. I need a word that is organic, that really comes out of the culture, that really expresses the spirit that we see in black women. And it’s just… womanish.
264. Resistance is the secret of joy!
265. I’m where I need to be, so my heart is light. Whatever happens, I know – I mean, I feel – that this is absolutely where I should be and I’ve lived up to my own expectations.
266. Humans – whatever billions we are – we don’t have the control. We are considered expendable, basically.
267. I was distressed that after 9/11, when the United States was attacked by terrorists, the United States’ response was to attack Afghanistan, where some of the terrorists had been.
268. Wherever I have knocked, a door has opened. Wherever I have wandered, a path has appeared.
269. Wish for nothing larger Than your own small heart.
270. Progress’ affects few. Only revolution can affect many.
271. Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.
272. Politically, the world is so confused right now – there’s so much suffering caused by various movements by various parties and people in power in government.
273. Everything wanna be loved. Us sing and dance, and holla just wanting to be loved.
274. I almost never do anything for Black History Month, because I feel it’s just another way to separate us.
275. I feel I am a child that’s lost its mother. I feel like a calf whose mother has gone off to slaughter.
276. Find yourself a cup of tea; the teapot is behind you. Now tell me about hundreds of things. Saki Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors.
277. If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.
278. I try to teach my heart not to want things it cant have.
279. The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate.
280. I had assumed that the Earth, the spirit of the Earth, noticed exceptions-those who wantonly damage it and those who do not. But the Earth is wise. It has given itself into the keeping of all, and all are therefore accountable.
281. To me war is something to be outgrown, recognized as immature, wasteful, and so destructive to life that human beings should shun it … as they once shunned bubonic plague.
282. Storytelling, you know, has a real function. The process of the storytelling is itself a healing process, partly because you have someone there who is taking the time to tell you a story that has great meaning to them. They’re taking the time to do this because your life could use some help, but they don’t want to come over and just give advice. They want to give it to you in a form that becomes inseparable from your whole self. That’s what stories do. Stories differ from advice in that, once you get them, they become a fabric of your whole soul. That is why they heal you.
283. Be nobody’s darling; Be an outcast. Take the contradictions Of your life And wrap around You like a shawl, To parry stones To keep you warm.
284. I started out as a poet. I’ve always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.
285. You really can’t be a good artist if you can’t say what you really feel. And people may be offended, but, you know, that’s how you feel, and that is your right, and that is your gift as well.
286. In each of us, there is a little voice that knows exactly which way to go. And I learned very early to listen to it, even though it has caused so much grief and havoc, and I think that is the only answer.
287. no person is your friend (or kin) who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow and be perceived as fully blossomed as you were intended. Or who belittles in any fashion the gifts you labor so to bring into the world.
288. Laughter isn’t even the other side of tears. It is tears turned inside out. Truly the suffering is great, here on earth. We blunder along, shredded by our mistakes, bludgeoned by our faults. Not having a clue where the dark path leads us. But on the whole, we stumble along bravely, don’t you think?
289. Poetry, I have discovered, is always unexpected and always as faithful and honest as dreams.
290. For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.
291. People will say to you, “Oh, you are fearless.” That is so not true. We should stop saying that about people. It’s a slander, really.
292. After all, how can a society flourish, a country attain democracy and health, children grow into intelligent beings, sensitive to the needs of an ever more fragile and endangered planet, if half it’s people are kept out of the driver’s seat?
293. Drew Dellinger is a deep and courageous poet. How lucky we are!
294. It just seems clear to me that as long as we are all here, it’s pretty clear that the struggle is to share the planet, rather than divide it.
295. The protection of evil must be the most self-destructive job.
296. The forest is the first cathedral. I felt that from the time I was a child. I credit my mother with that. I used to think it came from her Native-American side. Whichever it was, she instinctively connected with nature, and taught me that. Church just could not hold my spirit.
297. I have fought and kicked and fasted and prayed and cursed and cried myself to the point of existing.
298. I find it difficult to feel responsible for the suffering of others. That’s why I find war so hard to bear. It’s the same with animals: I feel the less harm I do, the lighter my heart. I love a light heart. And when I know I’m causing suffering, I feel the heaviness of it. It’s a physical pain. So it’s self-interest that I don’t want to cause harm.
299. Listen, God loves everything you love, and a mess of stuff you don’t.
300. My work is about my life, and what I want to do with it.
301. Peace will come wherever it is sincerely invited.
302. I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to.
303. The more I wonder, the more I love.
304. We are a people. A people do not throw their geniuses away. If they do, it is our duty as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children. If necessary, bone by bone.
305. It didn’t take long to realize I didn’t hardly know nothing. And that if you ast yourself why you black or a man or a woman or a bush it don’t mean nothing if you don’t ast why you here, period
306. I don’t know if you actually get something out of writing poetry. I think poetry is an autonomous muse that decides to come and sit on your couch.
307. Like I said…fine with me.
308. We are the ones we have been waiting for.
309. The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.
310. It must become a right of every person to die of old age. And if we secure this right for ourselves, we can, coincidentally, assure it for the planet.
311. If I’m killed – if I’m removed – there is nowhere else for me to go but to my ancestors.
312. I want something else; a different system entirely. One not seen on this earth for thousands of years. If ever. Democratic Womanism. Notice how this word has “man” right in the middle of it? That’s one reason I like it. He is right there, front and center. But he is surrounded. I want to vote and work for a way of life that honors the feminine.
313. Listen, God love everything you love – and a mess of stuff you don’t. But more than anything else, God love admiration. You saying God vain? I ast. Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. What it do when it pissed off? I ast. Oh, it make something else. People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.
314. Human beings may well be unable to break free of the dictatorship of greed that spreads like a miasma over the world, but no longer will we be an inarticulate and ignorant humanity, confused by our enslavement to superior cruelty and weaponry.
315. When the ax came into the forest the trees said the handle is one of us.
316. She was so quiet. So reflective. And she could erase herself, her spirit, with a swiftness that truly startled, when she knew the people around her could not respect it.
317. I really think admiration for nature can save us. I mean true admiration, to the point of not letting it be harmed.
318. You don’t need organized religion to connect with the universe. Often a church is the only place you can go to find peace and quiet… But it shouldn’t be confused with connecting with one’s spirit.
319. In order to be able to live at all in America I must be unafraid to live anywhere in it, and I must be able to live in the fashion and with whom I choose.
320. I think there is a sense of being forced at this time to look at America’s really large shadow and that’s not all that bad.
321. The nature of this flower is to bloom.
322. My mother was very strong. Once, she picked up a coconut and smashed it against my father’s head. It taught me about women defending themselves and not collapsing in a heap.
323. My mother had handed down respect for the possibilities…and the will to grasp them.
324. There is always a moment in any kind of struggle when one feels in full bloom. Vivid. Alive. One might be blown to bits in such a moment and still be at peace.
325. I can imagine in years to come that my papers and memorabilia, my journals and letters, will find themselves always in the company of people who care about many of the things I do.
326. We alone can devalue gold by not caring if it falls or rises in the marketplace. Wherever there is gold there is a chain, you know, and if your chain is gold so much the worse for you.
327. Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.
328. It is justice and respect that I want the world to dust off and put – without delay, and with tenderness – back on the head of the Palestinian child. It will be imperfect justice and respect because the injustice and disrespect have been so severe. But I believe we are right to try.
329. Helped are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception and realize a partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful.
330. It has been proved that the land can exist without the country – and be better for it; it has not been proved … that the country can exist without the land.
331. One thing that never ceases to amaze me, along with the growth of vegetation from the earth and of hair from the head, is the growth of understanding.
332. A writer’s heart, a poet’s heart, an artist’s heart, a musician’s heart is always breaking. It is through that broken window that we see the world.
333. I am not interested in being a role model, or in fulfilling the expectations of others. I know I am of most use to others and to myself by being this unique self: Nature, I have noticed, is not particularly devoted to copies, and human beings needn’t be either.
334. It’s so clear that you have to cherish everyone.
335. My great-great-great-grandmother walked as a slave from Virginia to Eatonton, Georgia… It is in memory of this walk that I chose to keep and to embrace my “maiden” name, Walker.
336. I feel that the ancestors are that covering that will cover me. I feel like I can only be enveloped in them spiritually and physically.
337. No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.
338. Freedom, after all, is like love: the more you give to others, the more you have.
339. Is solace anywhere more comforting than that in the arms of a sister.
340. In my opinion and experience, imperialists of all nations and races will tell us anything to keep us fighting. For them.
341. I feel a little peculiar around the children. For one thing, they grown. And I see they think me and Nettie and Shug and Albert and Samuel and Harpo and Sofia and Jack and Odessa real old and don’t know much what going on. But I don’t think us feel old at all. And us so happy. Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt.
342. You have to steal back yourself. You have to steal back your own mind. Meditation helps in that area.
343. As we talked of freedom and justice one day for all, we sat down to steaks. I am eating misery, I thought, as I took the first bite. And spit it out.
344. You got to fight them, Celie, she say. I can’t do it for you. You got to fight them for yourself. I don’t say nothing. I think bout Nettie, dead. She fight, she run away. What good it do? I don’t fight, I stay where I’m told. But I’m alive.
345. I am not lesbian, I am not bisexual, I am not straight. I am just curious
346. I am an elder, and I am delighted to be an elder. I would like to exhibit [and] explore it more – what an elder could mean in this time. But, I’d like to show that elders are good for us – that they can be good for us.
347. The artist…is the voice of the people.
348. To grow, to become spiritually alive, and vibrant, you really have to struggle. Without struggle, you do not move at all…I would appreciate it if readers who come to my work would try very, very, very hard not to think narrowly as we are taught to think in America.
349. Revolt is the mirror in which greed is forced to see itself.
350. Well, sometime Mr —— git on me pretty hard. I have to talk to Old Maker. But he my husband. I shrug my shoulders. This life soon be over, I say. Heaven last all ways. You ought to bash Mr —— head open, she say. Think bout heaven later.
351. I’m always amazed that people will actually choose to sit in front of the television and just be savaged by stuff that belittles their intelligence.
352. The only way to solace anyone who loved you in life is to be a good memory.
353. Some people don’t understand that it is the nature of the eye to have seen forever, and the nature of the mind to recall anything that was ever known.
354. Stretching [and] yoga [are] very helpful. All of these things – they really do help. Good food and a lot of sleep. And reading – reading good books. Sometimes movies – although a lot of the movies are difficult.
355. Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.
356. Animals can communicate quite well. And they do. And generally speaking, they are ignored
357. We must, I believe, start teaching our children the sanity of nonviolence much earlier.
358. It’s better to have your blackness taken away than to stand there and lie about who you actually are. That’s the trap.
359. Allowing freedom to others brings freedom to ourselves.
360. When people become elders – when they’re older; they can be old without being an elder, really. They [can] just be old and not very useful.
361. Aside from the fact that they say it’s unhealthy, my fat ain’t never been no trouble. Mens always have loved me. My kids ain’t never complained. Plus they’s fat.
362. People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.
363. I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.
364. It’s better to have your blackness taken away than to stand and lie about who you actually are.
365. Decide that you know what you think is good for you and go ahead and do it.
366. During my years of being close to people engaged in changing the world I have seen fear turn into courage. Sorrow into joy. Funerals into celebration. Because whatever the consequences, people, standing side by side, have expressed who they really are, and that ultimately they believe in the love of the world and each other enough to be that.
367. No song or poem will bear my mother’s name. Yet so many of the stories that I write, that we all write, are my mother’s stories.
368. In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.
369. As long as the Earth can make a spring every year, I can.
370. The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one’s people that has not previously been taken into account.
371. Even as I hold you, I am letting you go.
372. Those in power must spend a lot of their time laughing at us.
373. Man corrupt everything, say Shug. He on your box of grits, in your head, and all over the radio. He try to make you think he everywhere. Soon as you think he everywhere, you think he God. But he ain’t. Whenever you trying to pray, and man plop himself on the other end of it, tell him to git lost, say Shug. Conjure up the flowers, wind, water, a big rock.
374. I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering bout the big things and asking bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, the more I love.
375. This could be our revolution: to love what is plentiful as much as what’s scarce.
376. When life descends into the pit I must become my own candle Willingly burning my self To light up the darkness around me.
377. You can’t send me anywhere that I wouldn’t be happy to go. You’d be surprised as to how that lightens the heart.
378. In the far upper corner of my altar is a photo of Joan Crawford in her most fierce Mommy Dearest mode, just to remind me of some of the cost of everyone’s hard-earned sweetness and light.
379. You know a little drink now and then never hurt nobody, but when you can’t git started without asking the bottle, you in trouble.
380. Only dead people need loud music, you know.
381. I write not only what I want to read…I write all the things I should have been able to read.
382. It matters to me that I feel loved by the universe – and I do.
383. I don’t know. I imagine good teaching as a circle of earnest people sitting down to ask each other meaningful questions. I don’t see it as a handing down of answers.
384. Anything that forces you to act at the possible harm of your own existence is going to exact a cost. You have to then think about, “Can I pay this? What will this mean to me – to my relationships, to my family, to everybody? What is this going to take? How much of me is this going to take?”
385. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.
386. I have never felt that the one thing that I am ‘known for’ is what I am.
387. At one point I learned transcendental meditation. This was 30-something years ago. It took me back to the way that I naturally was as a child growing up way in the country, rarely seeing people. I was in that state of oneness with creation and it was as if I didn’t exist except as a part of everything.
388. If you want to have a life that is worth living, a life that expresses your deepest feelings and emotions, and cares and dreams, you have to fight for it.
389. It’s an awful feeling to write something that you feel is really important… and to feel that you’re being published by people who really don’t get it and/or don’t really care.
390. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don’t know what you looking for. Trouble do it for most folks, I think. … Yeah, It. God ain’t a he or a she, but a It.
391. Every small positive change we make in ourselves repays us in confidence in the future.
392. In South Korea, they believe that when you turn 60, you’ve become a baby again and the rest of your life should be totally about joy and happiness, and people should leave you alone, and I just think that that’s the height of intelligence.
393. He beat me like he beat the children. Cept he don’t never hardly beat them. He say, Celie, git the belt. The children be outside the room peeking through the cracks. It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That’s how come I know trees fear man.
394. We writers – we’re the snowflakes of the literary world. We each have our own shape.
395. Be an outcast. Be pleased to walk alone.
396. I’m the kind of woman that likes to enjoy herselves in peace.
397. Life is abundant, and life is beautiful. And it’s a good place that we’re all in, you know, on this earth, if we take care of it.
398. Howard Zinn helped us desegregate Atlanta. That was moving because he took a lot of abuse for that. He and Staughton Lynd, a fellow professor who was also from the North, stood with us. They were certainly behind us. In fact, they often stood in front of us. This had a huge impact on me. But one of the reasons I was very careful about speaking about the relationship I had with him and Staughton was because, in a racist society, if you acknowledge a deep love for and a deep debt owed to white teachers, they tend to discredit your own parents and your own community.
399. You know, one race will not be a survivor if the other one dies, and that’s something that we should think about.
400. I know from having had a child, and from having been a child myself, that children will copy you. So, the best way to get them to read, is to read. The best way to get them to do anything is to do it yourself, and they will absolutely copy you. That way, you don’t have to worry about what’s supposedly age appropriate, a child will pick something up when the child is ready.
401. We are all substantially flawed, wounded, angry, hurt, here on Earth. But this human condition, so painful to us, and in someways shameful- because we feel we are weak when the reality of ourselves is exposed- is made much more bearable when it is shared, face to face, in words that have expressive human eyes behind them.
402. The Olinka girls do not believe girls should be educated. When I asked a mother why she thought this, she said: A girl is nothing to herself; only to her husband can she become something. What can she become? I asked. Why, she said, the mother of his children. But I am not the mother of anybody’s children, I said, and I am something.
403. It no longer bothers me that I may be constantly searching for father figures; by this time, I have found several and dearly enjoyed knowing them all.
404. You seem so clear about who you are. So certain that you are just right as you are, that for all your intelligence and maybe in spite of it, you never seem to need a second opinion.
405. It has become a common feeling, I believe, as we have watched our heroes falling over the years, that our own small stone of activism, which might not seem to measure up to the rugged boulders of heroism we have so admired, is a paltry offering toward the building of an edifice of hope. Many who believe this choose to withhold their offerings out of shame. This is the tragedy of the world. For we can do nothing substantial toward changing our course on the planet, a destructive one, without rousing ourselves, individual by individual, and bringing our small, imperfect stones to the pile.
406. If you don’t have the ability or encouragement to use yourself in a physical way, you could become just another talking head. And talking heads run things. That’s part of the reason why we’re in such a sad state as a planet, because it’s all about thinking, and thinking has led to a lot of aggrandizement – taking over [resources] and figuring out how you can steal and leaving people and the planet in an impoverished state.
407. There are those who believe Black people possess the secret of joy and that it is this that will sustain them through any spiritual or moral or physical devastation.
408. human animals and nonhuman animals can communicate quite well; if we are brought up around animals as children we take this for granted. By the time we are adults we no longer remember.
409. Well, I think indigenous peoples have ways of living on the Earth that they’ve had forever. And they’ve been overrun by organized religion, which has had a lot of money and power.
410. Never be the only one, except, possibly, in your own home.
411. Resist the temptation to think what afflicts you is peculiar to you. Have faith that what is in your consciousness can be communicated to the consciousness of all. And is, in many cases, already there.
412. The infinite faith I have in people’s ability to understand anything that makes sense has always been justified, finally, by their behavior.
413. I know, in my soul, that to eat a creature who is raised to be eaten, and who never has a chance to be a real being, is unhealthy. It’s like…you’re just eating misery. You’re eating a bitter life.
Conclusion
Alice Walker quotes offer profound insights into the human experience, especially on topics like empowerment, social justice, and love.
Her words remind us to stay strong in the face of hardship, to stand up for what is right, and to always believe in our worth.
By reflecting on her powerful messages, we can find guidance and inspiration to navigate life’s challenges and contribute to a more just world.
