Alice Walker Quotes

Do not
be
like
cows
grazing
watching
the
butcher.

I continue to care for President Obama and for his family. I think that in many ways they are very courageous people, and I honor that, because I know what it means to live as a black person in a racist America.

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

Let 'im hear me, I say. If he ever listened to poor colored women the world would be a different place, I can tell you.

Like I said...fine with me.

I love the natural world - it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved.

Hope to sin only in the service of waking up.

I cry so much less than I used to. I used to be one of the most teary people.

What you do when you git mad? she ast.

I think. I can't even remember the last time I felt mad, I say. I used to git mad at my mammy cause she put a lot of work on me. Then I see how sick she is. Couldn't stay mad at her. Couldn't be mad at my daddy cause he my daddy. Bible say, Honor father and mother no matter what. Then after awhile every time I got mad, or start to feel mad, I got sick. Felt like throwing up. Terrible feeling. Then I start to feel nothing at all.

Sofia frown. Nothing at all?

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 about heaven later.

Not much funny to me. That funny. I laugh. She laugh. Then us both laugh . . .

Nature has created us with the capacity to know God, to experience God.

Here's the thing, say Shug. The thing I believe. 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. Sorrow, lord. Feeling like shit. It? I ask. Yeah, It. God ain't a he or a she, but a It. But what do it look like? I ask. Don't look like nothing, she say. It ain't a picture show. It ain't something you can look at apart from anything else, including yourself. I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you cam feel that, and be happy to feel that, you've found it.

Language is an intrinsic part of who we are and what has, for good or evil, happened to us.

That she had seen the magazines we receive from home and that it was very clear to her that black people did not truly admire blackskinned black people like herself, and especially did not admire blackskinned black women. They bleach their faces, she said. They fry their hair. They try to look naked.

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.

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

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.

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.

But one thing I do thank her for, for teaching me to learn for myself, by reading and studying and writing a clear hand.

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

Life is very different when you have a good friend. I've seen people without special friends, close friends. Other men, especially. For some reason men don't often make and keep friends. This is a real tragedy, I think, because in a way, without a tight male friend, you never really are able to see yourself.

My fantasy life. Without it I'm afraid to exist.

Abortion is an act of self-defense.

I don't know nothing, I think. And glad of it.

That was the beginning of her abstraction.

I met Howard Zinn in 1961, my first year at Spelman College in Atlanta. He was the tall, rangy, good-looking professor that many of the girls at Spelman swooned over.

There's something in all of us that wants a medal for what we have done. That wants to be appreciated.

Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance and holler, just trying to be loved.

Two old fools left over from love

She look me over from head to foot. Then she cackle. Sound like a death rattle. You sure is ugly, she say, like she ain't believed it.

Some people think politeness is an invitation to invade.

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.

I can spend two hours grubbing about in my garden, dazed with pleasure and intent, and it feels like five minutes.

Why you like this, huh? Why you always think you have to do things your own way? I ast your mama bout it one time, while you was in jail.
What she say? ast Sofia.
She say you think your way as good as anybody else's. Plus, it yours.
Sofia laugh.

I dead parting from them because in the short time we've been together they've been like family to me. Like family might have been, I mean.

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

I think Africans are very much like white people back home, in that they think they are the center of the universe and that everything that is done is done for them.

Choose
someone
to love
who
wouldn't even
hear
of it.

There was a saying among the Mundo: It takes only one lie to unravel the world.

In every life there comes a point when you have to make a decision about how you will live.

When I no longer have your heart
I will not request your body
your presence
or even your polite conversation.
I will go away to a far country
separated from you by the sea
- on which I cannot walk -
and refrain even from sending
letters
describing my pain.

I never have an intended audience. I just write, you know.

We'll, you know how nigger is. Can't nobody tell 'em nothing even today. Can't be rule. Every nigger you see got a kingdom in his head.

We do not admire their president.
We know why the White House is white.
We do not find their children irresistible;
We do not agree they should inherit the earth.

June a good time to go off into the world

We writers - we're the snowflakes of the literary world. We each have our own shape.

They think, after the biggest of the white folks no longer on the earth, the only way to stop making somebody the serpent is for everybody to accept everybody else as a child of God, or one mother's children, no matter what they look like or how they act.

Without money of one's own in a capitalist society, there is no such thing as independence.

Decide that you know what you think is good for you and go ahead and do it.

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.

I want 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.

Why any woman give a shit what people think is a mystery to me.

As long as the Earth can make a spring every year, I can.

Allowing freedom to others brings freedom to ourselves.

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!

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.

It's better to have your blackness taken away than to stand there and lie about who you actually are. That's the trap.

What she showed me was, Yes, I am Grandmother as she is; there is no separation, really, between us. And that, on this planet, Grandmother Earth, there is no higher authority. That our inseparability is why the planet will be steered to safety by Grandmother/Grandmothers or it will not be steered to safety at all.

This is the true wine of astonishment: We are not over when we think we are.

I grew up in the South under segregation. So, 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. I mean, that's terrorism, too.

The colonizing mind invites itself wherever it wishes to intrude; it is a worthwhile practice for the coming millennium to train ourselves away from such a mind.

Part of what existence means to me is knowing the difference between what I am now and what I was then. It is being capable of looking after myself intellectually as well as financially. It is being able to tell when I am being wronged and by whom. It means being awake to protect myself and the ones I love. It means being a part of the world community, and being alert to which part it is that I have joined, and knowing how to change to another part if that part does not suit me. To know is to exist: to exist is to be involved, to move about, to see the world with my own eyes. This, at least, the Movement has given me.

They say he "hit a square" while flying his small aircraft; a situation in which it is impossible to tell up from down or earth from sky and that he lost his way.

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.

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.

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.

It is important to remember yourself.

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.

Activism is my rent for living on the planet.

She saw poetry where other writers merely saw failure to cope with English.

I think of the meaning of the word "testimony." Originally it named the custom of two men holding each other's testicles in a gesture of trust, later to metamorphose into the handshake.

I think the War on Terror is really absurd, especially coming from a country that is founded on terrorism.

We all have to start somewhere if us want to do better, an d out of self is what us have to hand

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.

Sexuality is one of the ways that we become enlightened, actually, because it leads us to self-knowledge.

Once you feel loved by the universe, you're already accepted, and you're not really concerned about offending people.

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 to know trees fear man.

The fact is that when you do something from your heart, you leave a heart print.

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

I try to teach my heart not to want nothing it can't have

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.

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.

I used to meditate all the time in bed. That was when I was raising my daughter, and I'd get her up and off to school, and then I would go back to bed and meditate. And then I would do the same in the evening, and that was very good for that period because I had so many things to juggle as a single mother.

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.

The savage rushing of the river seemed to be inside her head, inside her body. Even when the oarswomen, their guides, were speaking to her, she had the impression she couldn't quite hear them because of the roar. Not of the river that did indeed roar, just behind them, close to the simple shelter they'd made for her, but because of an internal roar as of the sound of a massive accumulation of words, spoken all at once, but collected over a lifetime, now trying to leave her body. As they rose to her lips, and in response to the question: Do you want to go home? she leaned over a patch of yellow grass near her elbow and threw up.
All the words from decades of her life filled her throat. Words she had said or had imagined saying or had swallowed before saying to her father, dead these many years. All the words to her mother. To her husbands. Children. Lovers. The words shouted back at the television set, spreading its virus of mental confusion.
Once begun, the retching went on and on. She would stop, gasping for breath, rest a minute, and be off again. Draining her body of precious fluid... Soon, exhausted, she was done.
No, she had said weakly, I don't want to go home. I'll be all right now.

Even as I hold you
I think of you as someone gone
far, far away. Your eyes the color
of pennies in a bowl of dark honey
bringing sweet light to someone else
your black hair slipping through my fingers
is the flash of your head going
around a corner
your smile, breaking before me,
the flippant last turn
of a revolving door,
emptying you out, changed,
away from me.
Even as I hold you
I am letting go.

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.

Many people are aware that we are in peril and that there is no trustworthy leadership.

Shug: More than anything God love admiration.
Celie: You saying God is vain?
Shug: No, not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off when you walk by the colour purple in a field and don't notice it.
Celie: You saying it just wanna be loved like it say in the bible?
Shug: Yeah, Celie. Everything wanna be loved. Us sing and dance, and holla just wanting to be loved. Look at them trees. Notice how the trees do everything people do to get attention ... except walk?
[they laugh]
Shug: Oh Miss Celie, I feels like singing!

Sofia take up the clothes, straighten them out, stand by the ironing board with her hand on the iron. Sofia the kind of woman no matter what she have in her hand it look like a weapon.

I'm sure we, the American people, are the butt of jokes by those in power.

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.

It's very hard for our parents who see us enter a world that they can't imagine.

The years have come and gone without a single word from you. Only the sky above us do we hold in common. I look at it often as if, somehow, reflected from its immensities, I will one day find myself gazing into your eyes.

I believe you mother everybody, not in a cloying, hovering way, but taking care of what is around you.

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.

I talk to myself a lot, standing in front the mirror. Celie, I say, happiness was just a trick in your case. Just cause you never had any before Shug, you thought it was time to have some, and that it was gon last. Even thought you had the trees with you. The whole earth. The stars. But look at you. When Shug left, happiness desert.

The longer I am a writer
so long now that my writing finger is periodically numb
the better I understand what writing is; what its function is; what it is supposed to do. I learn that the writer's pen is a microphone held up to the mouths of ancestors and even stones of long ago. That once given permission by the writer
a fool, and so why should one fear?
horses, dogs, rivers, and, yes, chickens can step forward and expound on their lives. The magic of this is not so much in the power of the microphone as in the ability of the nonhuman object or animal to BE and the human animal to PERCEIVE ITS BEING.

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

Why can't Tashi come to school? she asked me. When I told her the Olinka don't believe in educating girls she said, quick as a flash, They're like white people at home who don't want colored people to learn. Oh, she's sharp, Celie. At the end of the day, when Tashi can get away from all the chores her mother assigns her, she and Olivia secret themselves in my hut and everything Olivia has learned she shares with Tashi. To Olivia right now Tashi alone is Africa. The Africa she came beaming across the ocean hoping to find. Everything else is difficult for her.

I don't generally read reviews.