Top 100 Alice Walker's Quotes
#1. Judy Collins sings about in "The Blizzard," or read Alice Walker's essay "My Father's Country Is the Poor." Each
Gloria Steinem
#2. 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
#3. The infinite faith I have in people's ability to understand anything that makes sense has always been justified, finally, by their behavior.
Alice Walker
#4. I think that's what Toni Morrison and Alice Walker understand, the secret language of women. That it's not a secret at all; men just don't know how to listen.
Marlon James
#5. 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.
Alice Walker
#6. 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.
Alice Walker
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. I gave my archive to Emory University because there's a really dear friend who teaches there, Rudolph Byrd, and he's the editor.
Alice Walker
#10. Without money of one's own in a capitalist society, there is no such thing as independence.
Alice Walker
#11. We do it because we care. We care that Vincent Van Gogh mutilated his ear. We care that behind a pile of manure in the yard he destroyed his life. We care that Scott Joplin's music lives! We care because we know this: the life we save is our own.
Alice Walker
#12. 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
#13. 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.
Alice Walker
#14. A little love, a little buckshot, that's how I'd say handle yourself.
Alice Walker
#15. You don't always have to be doing something. You can just be, and that's plenty.
Alice Walker
#16. 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
#17. There's something in all of us that wants a medal for what we have done. That wants to be appreciated.
Alice Walker
#18. 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.
Alice Walker
#19. 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.
Alice Walker
#20. 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.
Alice Walker
#21. 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.
Alice Walker
#22. I'm not being disrespectful of the medium; it's just not as important as the work that I actually do [books].
Alice Walker
#23. Criticism is painful when it's not done with love.
Alice Walker
#24. It's better to have your blackness taken away than to stand there and lie about who you actually are. That's the trap.
Alice Walker
#25. 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.
Alice Walker
#26. I'm tri-racial: African-American, Native American and Euro - that's the Scotch-Irish part.
Alice Walker
#27. I just think cities are unnatural, basically. I know there are people who live happily in them, and I have cities that I love, too. But it's a disaster that we have moved so far from nature.
Alice Walker
#28. 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.
Alice Walker
#29. 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.
Alice Walker
#30. 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.
Alice Walker
#31. 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.
Alice Walker
#32. I can be almost terminally grief-stricken because things are so dire, but at the same time, there's a real lightheartedness about just the recoverability of life, of how things change, how they're not the same, ever again.
Alice Walker
#33. 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.
Alice Walker
#34. 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
#35. On a spiritual level, it's as though with my sighted eye I see what's before me, and with my unsighted eye I see what's hidden. It's illuminated life more than darkened it.
Alice Walker
#36. 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
#37. In search of my mother's garden, I found my own.
Alice Walker
#38. 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
#39. There's an ecstatic side to writing. It's like jazz. It just has a life.
Alice Walker
#40. Part of our tradition as black women is that we are universalists. Black children, yellow children, red children, brown children, that is the black woman's normal, day-to-day relationship. In my family alone, we are about four different colors.
Alice Walker
#41. As I get older, I realize that the thing I value the most is good-heartednes s.
Alice Walker
#42. 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
#43. I loved 1930's women's pictures'films by Josef Von Sternberg or William Wyler. So, I fashioned a style out of that. The integrity and ethos of what I would write, however, came from the films of Ousmane Sembene and from reading Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath and Alice Walker.
Kola Boof
#44. But what was good tween us must have been nothing but bodies, she say. Cause I don't know the Albert that don't dance, can't hardly laugh, never talk bout nothing, beat you and hid your sister Nettie's letters. Who he?
Alice Walker
#45. 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
#46. This is the true wine of astonishment: We are not over when we think we are.
Alice Walker
#47. HELPED are those who are shown the existence of the Creator's magic in the Universe; they shall experience delight and astonishment without ceasing.
Alice Walker
#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.
Alice Walker
#50. 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
#51. 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.
Alice Walker
#52. 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.
Alice Walker
#53. 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.
Alice Walker
#54. 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.
Alice Walker
#55. You have to give others the opportunity to love who you love. If they don't accept it, it's their loss.
Alice Walker
#56. She standing there looking me straight in the eye. She look tired and her jaws full of air.
I say it's cause I'm a fool, I say. I say it cause I'm jealous of you. I say it cause you do what I can't.
What that? she say.
Fight. I say.
Alice Walker
#57. I think war is so incredibly backward, and I don't think it's intelligent, and it's not sane. So why would you want to support it?
Alice Walker
#58. 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.
Alice Walker
#59. 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
#60. I want the Israeli government to be made accountable for its behaviour to the Palestinians, and I want the people of the U.S. to cease acting as if they don't understand what is going on.
Alice Walker
#61. 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
#62. Fiction is such a world of freedom, it's wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.
Alice Walker
#63. What's really hard is that you could care a lot for someone and not want to live with him anymore.
Alice Walker
#64. 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
#65. 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.
Alice Walker
#66. Love is big; love can hold anger, love can even hold hatred. It's about the intention of what you want it to do.
Alice Walker
#67. I love the women's movement, and I never thought of it as belonging to any particular segment of the population.
Alice Walker
#68. You know, one race will not be a survivor if the other one dies, and that's something that we should think about.
Alice Walker
#69. 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?
Alice Walker
#70. A good model of how to 'work with the enemy' internally is presented by the Dalai Lama, in his endless caretaking of his soul as he confronts the Chinese government that invaded Tibet.
Alice Walker
#71. One of the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement is that when you travel through the South today, you do not feel overwhelmed by a residue of grievance and hate.
Alice Walker
#72. Activism is the rent I pay for living on this planet.
Alice Walker
#73. Nobody has ever convinced me that race is real.
Alice Walker
#75. I think that all people who feel that there is injustice in the world anywhere should learn as much of it as they can bear. That is our duty.
Alice Walker
#76. The brilliance of enslaving the spirit is that it is an invisible prison from which the inmate appears to derive some comfort.
Alice Walker
#77. 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.
Alice Walker
#78. 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.
Alice Walker
#79. 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.
Alice Walker
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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.
Alice Walker
#83. I love us so incredibly, insanely deeply; it's almost unbearable to see what we do to ourselves.
Alice Walker
#84. You can't truly have an open heart until it's been broken.
Alice Walker
#85. It's a tragedy, in a way, that Americans are brought up to think that they cannot feel for other people and other beings just because they are different. They think they're different. It's very limiting.
Alice Walker
#86. 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.
Alice Walker
#87. 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
#88. 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.
Alice Walker
#89. 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.
Alice Walker
#90. 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.
Alice Walker
#91. I think all documentaries leave out areas of people's lives. Which is good. There are areas that need not be explored.
Alice Walker
#92. I start each book when it's ready and never before.
Alice Walker
#93. Not everyone's life is what they make it. Some people's life is what other people make it.
Alice Walker
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. It is because I recognize the brutality with which my own multi-branched ancestors have been treated that I can identify the despicable, lawless, cruel, and sadistic behavior that has characterized Israel's attempts to erase a people, the Palestinians, from their own land.
Alice Walker
#97. My life is not to be somebody else's impact - you know what I mean?
Alice Walker
#98. 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
#99. This was my first indication of the quality I feel is most characteristic of Zora's work: racial health; a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings, a sense that is lacking in so much black writing and literature.
Alice Walker
#100. It's very hard for our parents who see us enter a world that they can't imagine.
Alice Walker
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