Top 100 Alice Walker Quotes
#1. And to me, wildness means following the growth of love. Like a plant reaching through stone toward the sun-
Alice Walker
#2. HELPED are those who laugh with a pure heart; theirs will be the company of the jolly righteous.
Alice Walker
#3. I live on the West Coast of the United States, and yet the air that I breathe is sometimes the same air that was being breathed in China the day before.
Alice Walker
#4. 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.
Alice Walker
#5. 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.
Alice Walker
#7. I have fought and kicked and fasted and prayed and cursed and cried myself to the point of existing.
Alice Walker
#8. The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one's people that has not previously been taken into account.
Alice Walker
#9. What's really hard is that you could care a lot for someone and not want to live with him anymore.
Alice Walker
#11. I'm not lesbian; I'm not bisexual; I'm not straight. I'm just curious.
Alice Walker
#12. I can easily imagine Obama sitting down and talking to any leader - or any person - in the world, with no baggage of past servitude or race supremacy to mar their talks.
Alice Walker
#13. 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.
Alice Walker
#14. Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.
Alice Walker
#15. Choose
someone
to love
who
wouldn't even
hear
of it.
Alice Walker
#16. I can spend two hours grubbing about in my garden, dazed with pleasure and intent, and it feels like five minutes.
Alice Walker
#17. Peace: the fruit of justice done especially to the Self.
Alice Walker
#18. Many readers fail to realize this, but 'The Color Purple' is a theological text. It is about the reclamation of one's original God: the earth and nature.
Alice Walker
#19. Sucking up to the biggies won't get us anywhere.
Alice Walker
#20. 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
#21. Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.
Alice Walker
#22. 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.'
Alice Walker
#23. Any God I ever found in church, I brought in myself.
Alice Walker
#24. Every soul is to be cherished, every flower is to bloom.
Alice Walker
#25. Hard to be Christ too, say Shug. But he manage. Remember that. Thou Shalt Not Kill, He said. And probably wanted to add on to that, Starting with me. He knowed the fools he was dealing with.
Alice Walker
#26. It is this broken road with pitfalls and sharp turns and unexpected traverses that has brought me joy and adventure.
Alice Walker
#27. 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.
Alice Walker
#28. 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.
Alice Walker
#29. Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.
Alice Walker
#30. My life is not to be somebody else's impact - you know what I mean?
Alice Walker
#31. Not everyone's life is what they make it. Some people's life is what other people make it.
Alice Walker
#32. I start each book when it's ready and never before.
Alice Walker
#33. The three wealthiest people in the world own more than the GDP of forty-eight countries!
Alice Walker
#34. I advocate that every woman be a part of a circle, and a circle that meets at least once a month, or if you can't do that, once every two months or every four months.
Alice Walker
#35. Just because I don't harass it like some peoples us know don't mean I ain't got religion.
Alice Walker
#36. We do not believe in heaven or hell ... ; we do not believe in eternal damnation. We believe only in the unavoidable horror of hurting others and of likewise being hurt.
Alice Walker
#37. I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.
Alice Walker
#38. Oh, Celie, unbelief is a terrible thing. And so is the hurt we cause others unknowingly.
Alice Walker
#39. 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
#40. She used to read to us without pity; forcing words, lies, other folks' habits, whole lives upon us two, sitting trapped and ignorant underneath her voice. She washed us in a river of make-believe, burned us with a lot of knowledge we didn't necessarily need to know.
Alice Walker
#41. I live a very secluded life, a very contemplative life and a very meditative one. That is my ideal life.
Alice Walker
#42. Women have to summon courage to fulfill dormant dreams.
Alice Walker
#43. I'm for women choosing whatever they want to do but they have to really know what they are doing.
Alice Walker
#44. He beat me when you not here, I say.
Who do, she say, Albert?
Mr , I say.
I can't believe it, she say. She sit down on the bench next to me real hard, like she drop.
What he beat you for? she ast.
For being me and not you.
Alice Walker
#45. Women have to summon up courage to fulfill dormant dreams.
Alice Walker
#46. I am so happy. I got love, I got work, I got money, friends and time.
Alice Walker
#47. I think many people in my community had very different kinds of mothers: they had mothers who acquiesced in the system of male and white-supremacist domination, and my mother never did. She just could not do it. It just wasn't in her.
Alice Walker
#48. War will stop when we no longer praise it, or give it any attention at all. Peace will come wherever it is sincerely invited.
Alice Walker
#49. Part of my ancestry is Cherokee. And in that tradition, you become an adult when you're 52.
Alice Walker
#50. 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.
Alice Walker
#51. Criticism is painful when it's not done with love.
Alice Walker
#52. In my opinion and experience, imperialists of all nations and races will tell us anything to keep us fighting. For them.
Alice Walker
#53. 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.
Alice Walker
#54. 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.
Alice Walker
#55. Every small positive change we make in ourselves repays us in confidence in the future.
Alice Walker
#56. I have never felt that the one thing that I am 'known for' is what I am.
Alice Walker
#57. His little whistle sound like it lost way down a jar, and the jar in the bottom of the creek. P. 64
Alice Walker
#58. World wars have been fought and lost; for every war is against the world and every war against the world is lost.
Alice Walker
#59. They think they can kill a continent - people, trees, buffalo - and then fly off to the moon and just forget about it. But you and me we're going to remember the people, the trees and the fucking buffalo. Goddammit.
Alice Walker
#60. We're asleep, said Suni. Just walking and talking, eating and shitting. Sound asleep.
And we have to be that way, of course, said Anne. It's the human equivalent of fallowness.
Spiritual hibernation, said Suni.
Alice Walker
#61. 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.
Alice Walker
#62. A little love, a little buckshot, that's how I'd say handle yourself.
Alice Walker
#63. And one of the most serious things for me has been the understanding that the Universe is not that interested in punishing us. Every move we make is simply part of its reflection.
Alice Walker
#64. 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.
Alice Walker
#65. 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.
Alice Walker
#66. When I joined the freedom movement in Mississippi in my early 20s, it was to come to the aid of sharecroppers, like my parents, who had been thrown off the land they'd always known - the plantations - because they attempted to exercise their 'democratic' right to vote.
Alice Walker
#67. I see myself in all the people in the world who are suffering and who are very badly treated and who are often made to feel that they have no place on this Earth.
Alice Walker
#69. Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.
Alice Walker
#70. 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.
Alice Walker
#71. I'm still living at least five parallel lives, honestly! I wonder about it. I have no idea how that happens.
Alice Walker
#72. 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.
Alice Walker
#73. I know black people love the idea that we finally have a beautiful, good-looking black president. But if he is doing awful things to us, we should wake up.
Alice Walker
#74. The dropping of bombs on people - isn't that terrorism?
Alice Walker
#75. 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.
Alice Walker
#77. My work is about my life, and what I want to do with it.
Alice Walker
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. This is the true wine of astonishment: We are not over when we think we are.
Alice Walker
#81. 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.
Alice Walker
#82. He never says anything off the top of his head
Alice Walker
#83. 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.
Alice Walker
#84. She look so stylish it like the trees all round the house draw themself up tall for a better look.
Alice Walker
#85. I was brought up to try to see what was wrong and right it. Since I am a writer, writing is how I right it.
Alice Walker
#87. It always making little surprises and springing them on us when us least expect.
Alice Walker
#88. Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.
Alice Walker
#89. 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.
Alice Walker
#90. 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.
Alice Walker
#92. Men make war to get attention. All killing is an expression of self-hate.
Alice Walker
#93. Dear Nettie, I don't write to God no more, I write to you.
Alice Walker
#94. 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?
Alice Walker
#95. 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.
Alice Walker
#96. We are a people. A people do not throw their geniuses away. And if they are thrown away, it is our duty as artists and as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children, and, if necessary, bone by bone.
Alice Walker
#97. Shug say, What, too shamefaced to put singing and dancing and fucking together? She laugh. That's the reason they call what us sing the devil's music. Devils love to fuck.
Alice Walker
#98. 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.
Alice Walker
#99. 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.
Alice Walker
#100. People really had a problem with my disinterest in submission. They had a problem with my intellect, and they had a problem with my choice of lovers. They had a problem with my choice of everything.
Alice Walker
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