Alice Walker Quotes

HELPED are those who laugh with a pure heart; theirs will be the company of the jolly righteous. ~ Alice Walker

I could never live happily in Africa-or anywhere else-until I could live freely in Mississippi. ~ Alice Walker

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

Do you know what O'Keefe Says about blue? he asked her, blowing out a cloud of smoke, warming to her voice, though he did not remember her face clearly from the opening night's exhibition.
What?
That it is the color that will remain after everything is destroyed. ~ Alice Walker

Why aren't you happy in America, if everyone there drives motorcars? ~ Alice Walker

But they say just like they know history before the white children start to come, they know the future after the biggest of 'em leave. They say they know these particular children and they gon kill each other off, they still so mad bout being unwanted. Gon kill off a lot of other folk too who got some color. In fact, they gon kill off so much of the earth and the colored that everybody gon hate them just like they hate us today. Then they will become the new serpent. And wherever a white person is found he'll be crush by somebody not white, just like they do us today. ~ Alice Walker

... People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. - Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet ~ Alice Walker

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

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. ~ Alice Walker

Do not
be
like
cows
grazing
watching
the
butcher. ~ Alice Walker

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 ~ Alice Walker

it was this inner peace that attracted peace around her. ~ Alice Walker

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. ~ Alice Walker

I do not grieve in the abstract, but in the heart. ~ Alice Walker

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. ~ Alice Walker

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. ~ Alice Walker

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. ~ Alice Walker

It is natural to want to have a future. ~ Alice Walker

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. ~ Alice Walker

It's not possible to stop love. ~ Alice Walker

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. ~ Alice Walker

Whenever you are creating beauty around you, you are restoring your own soul. ~ Alice Walker

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." ~ Alice Walker

You bring children into the world. You love them with heart and soul. ~ Alice Walker

As others might prepare for an exam whose subject matter is unknown to them, so I must study, cram, for every conversation with my folks. ~ Alice Walker

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

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 . . . ~ Alice Walker

The Nature of This Flower Is to Bloom
Rebellious. Living.
Against the Elemental Crush.
A Song of Color
Blooming
For Deserving Eyes.
Blooming Gloriously
For its Self. ~ Alice Walker

We've never seen weather like the weather there is today. We've never seen violence like the violence we see today. We've never seen greed or evil like the greed and evil we see today. We've never seen tomatoes either, like the ones being created today. There is much from which to recoil. ~ Alice Walker

Sometimes I feel mad at her. Feel like I could scratch her hair right off her head. But then I think, Shug got a right to live too. She got a right to look over the world in whatever company she choose. Just cause I love her don't take none of her rights. ~ Alice Walker

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

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. ~ Alice Walker

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. ~ Alice Walker

- 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.- ~ Alice Walker

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 ... ~ Alice Walker

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

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. ~ Alice Walker

People who think nonviolence is easy don't realize that it's a spiritual discipline that requires a great deal of strength, growth, and purging of the self so that one can overcome almost any obstacle for the good of all without being concerned about one's own welfare. ~ Alice Walker

All womens not alike, Tobias, she say. Believe it or not.
Oh, I believe it, he say. Just can't prove it to the world. ~ Alice Walker

The world is changing. It is no longer a world just for boys and men ~ Alice Walker

I have never felt that the one thing that I am 'known for' is what I am. ~ Alice Walker

Merger Evers/John F. Kennedy/Malcolm X/Martin Luther King/Robert Kennedy/Che Guevara/Patrice Lamumba/George Jackson/Cynthia Wesley/Addie Mae Collins/Denise McNair/Carole Robertson/Viola Liuzzo
It was a decade marked by death. Violent and inevitable. Funerals became engraved on the brain, intensifying the ephemeral nature of life. For many in the South it was a decade reminiscent of earlier times, when oak trees sighed over their burdens in the wind; Spanish moss draggled blood to the ground; amen corners creaked with grief; and the thrill of being able, once again, to endure unendurable loss produced so profound an ecstasy in mourners that they strutted, without noticing their feet, along the thin backs of benches: their piercing shouts of anguish and joy never interrupted by an inglorious fall. They shared rituals for the dead to be remembered. ~ Alice Walker

Today Americans, who used to feel welcomed wherever we went, travel abroad with trepidation. We know we are not trusted or liked, that we are even hated, by millions of people around the globe. We must ask ourselves why this is so and do the work of discovering our historical behavior toward the other countries and peoples of the planet. As disturbing as this will be, it is a first step toward a peaceful existence. Not because we can make peace for our country, but because we can make peace without ourselves by changing any harmful behavior or attitudes that contribute to our present predicament. Choose any country on the map that appears to hate America. Listen to what people are shouting at their rallies and read what their banners proclaim in the street. Sit with their anger until you can see America through their eyes... Remember that you, yourself, are America. The U.S. Behave as if you are the entire country and carry yourself with humility and dignity. ~ Alice Walker

Perhaps this is simply the way it is with writers. It's when they don't see you that you matter. Because then you can belong to them in a way that permits them complete possession. You are determined by them. You are controlled. You are, generally speaking, exaggerated. ~ Alice Walker

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 ... ~ Alice Walker

Who am I to tell her who to love? My job just to love her good and true myself. P. 237 ~ Alice Walker

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. ~ Alice Walker

And I don't believe you dead. How can you be dead if I still feel you? Maybe, like God, you changed into something different that I'll have to speak to in a different way, but you not dead to me Nettie. And never will you be. ~ Alice Walker

Would the end be brutish and short? Or would it be long and drawn out? People dying slowly of every illness under the sun. From viruses that seeped from under jungle rocks. From infections received while making love. From fratricide. Genocide. Hatred that intensified over decades, centuries, until nothing could stop its rolling over and flattening entire peoples, races, continents. Would the passion and joy of future generations be expressed in acts of hate, as acts of "sex" were now routinely expressed in acts of violence? ~ Alice Walker

He say, Celie, tell me the truth. You don't like me cause I'm a man?
I blow my nose. take off they pants, I say, and men look like frogs to me. No matter how you kiss 'em, as far as I'm concern, frogs is what they stay. ~ Alice Walker

You cannot see the changes that you're dreaming about, because they're internal. ~ Alice Walker

When life descends into the pit
I must become my own candle
Willingly burning my self
To light up the darkness around me. ~ Alice Walker

I am often asked what keeps me going after all these years. I think it is the realization that there is no final struggle. Whether you win or lose, each struggle brings forth new contradictions, new and more challenging questions. As Alice Walker put it in one of my favorite poems: I must love the questions themselves as Rilke said like locked rooms full of treasures to which my blind and groping key does not yet fit.1 ~ Grace Lee Boggs

First time I got the full sight of Shug Avery long black body with it black plum nipples, look like her mouth, I thought I had turned into a man ~ Alice Walker

Happiness was just a trick in your case. ~ Alice Walker

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? ~ Alice Walker

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. ~ Alice Walker

The dropping of bombs on people - isn't that terrorism? ~ Alice Walker

Tashi's mother and father were just here. They are upset because she spends so much time with Olivia. She is changing, becoming quiet and too thoughtful, they say. She is becoming someone else; her face is beginning to show the spirit of one of her aunts who was sold to the trader because she no longer fit into village life. This aunt refused to marry the man chosen for her. Refused to bow to the chief. Did nothing but lay up, crack cola nuts between her teeth and giggle. ~ Alice Walker

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. ~ Alice Walker

You don't always have to be doing something. You can just be, and that's plenty. ~ Alice Walker

I'm thinking of the moment something dies and how we instinctively know it. And of how we try not to know what we know because we do not yet understand how we are to negotiate change. ~ Alice Walker

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

Some colored people so scared of whitefolks they claim to love the cotton gin. ~ Alice Walker

If she come, I be happy. If she don't, I be content. ~ Alice Walker

Activism is my rent for living on the planet. ~ Alice Walker

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. ~ Alice Walker

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

Horses make a landscape look beautiful. ~ Alice Walker

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. ~ Alice Walker

I don't generally read reviews. ~ Alice Walker

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. ~ Alice Walker

Poetry, I have discovered, is always unexpected and always as faithful and honest as dreams. ~ Alice Walker

Too much respect for people who are not respectful to you is a sure sign of insecurity. ~ Alice Walker

I think 'The Color Purple' is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the need for connection around the globe. ~ Alice Walker

She did not see why anyone should worry about her soul, even the people she marched with. "When it gives me trouble," she'd sneer, "I'll call y'all. ~ Alice Walker

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. ~ Alice Walker

You must run around like a crazy person or walk sedately honoring the dead. ~ Alice Walker

I am not lesbian, I am not bisexual, I am not straight. I am just curious ~ Alice Walker

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. ~ Alice Walker

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. ~ Alice Walker

One crying child is the rotten apple in the barrel of the tribe! ~ Alice Walker

Kate thought Yolo was of the bear spirit. The bear, according to ancient people who had known bears well, was of a loyal, generous and young-loving nature. Bear mothers were the most dedicated parents imaginable. The most fierce in protecting their young; but also the most peaceful creatures when left unmolested. People with bear spirit had a certain level feel about them: they often seemed large and strong, even if they weren't particularly. They gave off a vibe that made you want to sit near them. Not to talk, necessarily, but to feel. ~ Alice Walker

The real revolution is always concerned with the least glamorous stuff. With raising a reading level from second grade to third. With simplifying history and writing it down (or reciting it) for the old folks. With helping illiterates fill out a food-stamps form - for they must eat, revolution or not. ~ Alice Walker

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. ~ Alice Walker

A grown child is a dangerous thing. ~ Alice Walker

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. ~ Alice Walker

Because whatever has happened to humanity, whatever is currently happening to humanity, it is happening to all of us. 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. My illness proved that. As well as my understanding that Generose's lost daughter belongs to all of us. It is up to all of us to find her; it is up to us to do our best to make her whole again. There is only one daughter, one father, one mother, one son, one aunt or uncle, one dog, one cat, donkey, monkey, or goat in the universe, after all: the one right in front of you. ~ Alice Walker

I will read anything by Laura Hillenbrand, Walter Isaacson, Barbara Kingsolver, John le Carre, John Grisham, Hilary Mantel, Toni Morrison, Anna Quindlen and Alice Walker. ~ Hillary Clinton

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

Hope to sin only in the service of waking up. ~ Alice Walker

For instance: scorpions, vipers, and yellow jackets in paradise? How to accept gracefully the part of GOD that stings! ~ Alice Walker

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

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

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. ~ Alice Walker

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. ~ Alice Walker

I'm mad about the waste that happens when people who love each other can't even bring themselves to talk. ~ Alice Walker

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

Artists have a responsibility to speak and to act when governments fail, and if we don't do that, we really deserve the world we get. ~ Alice Walker

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. ~ Alice Walker