Alice Walker Quotes

You are all talking a bit too much, said Armando, who had cautioned them from the beginning to stay out of popular culture and in their own interior worlds.When you are caught up in the world that you did not design as support for your life and the life of earth and people, it is like being caught in someone else's dream or nightmare. Many people exist in their lives in this way. I say exist because it is not really living. It is akin to being suspended in a dream one is having at night, a dream over which one has no control. You are going here and there, seeing this and that person; you do not know or care about them usually, they are just there, on your interior screen. Humankind will not survive if we continue in this way, most of us living lives in which our own life is not the center.
Alice Walker
Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.
Alice Walker
Our mothers and our grandmothers some of them: moving to music not yet written.
Alice Walker
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
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.
Alice Walker
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
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.
Alice Walker
The experience of God or in any case the possibility of experiencing God is innate.
Alice Walker
No person is your friend who demands your silence or denies your right to grow.
Alice Walker
Is solace anywhere more comforting than in the arms of sisters?
Alice Walker
Women have to summon up courage to fulfill dormant dreams.
Alice Walker
I have learned not to worry about love but to honor its coming with all my heart.
Alice Walker
The Nature of This Flower is to bloom.
Alice Walker
All these faces look happy enough, say Shug. Big and beefy. Eyes clear and innocent, like they don't know them other crooks on the front page. But they the same folks, she say.
Alice Walker
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
I am an expression of the divine, just like a peach is, just like a fish is.
Alice Walker
This friendship among women is something Samuel often talks about. Because the women share a husband but the husband does not share their friendships, it makes Samuel uneasy. It is confusing, I suppose. And it is Samuel's duty as a Christian minister to preach the bible's directive of one husband and one wife. Samuel is confused because ti him, since the women are friends and will do anything for one another - not always, but more often than anyone from America would expect - and since they giggle and gossip and nurse each other's children, then they must be happy with things as they are. (Walker 2000: 141)
Alice Walker
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.
Alice Walker
The world is changing, I said. It is no longer a world just for boys and men.Our women are respected here, said the father. We would never let them tramp the world as American women do. There is always someone to look after the Olinka woman. A father. An uncle. A brother or nephew. Do not be offended, Sister Nettie, but our people pity women such as you who are cast out, we know not from where, into a world unknown to you, where you must struggle all alone, for yourself.So I am an object of pity and contempt, I thought, to men and women alike.Furthermore, said Tashi’s father, we are not simpletons. We understand that there are places in the world where women live differently from the way our women do, but we do not approve of this different way for our children.But life is changing, even in Olinka, I said. We are here.He spat on the ground. What are you? Three grownups and two children. In the rainy season some of you will probably die. You people do not last long in our climate. If you do not die, you will be weakened by illness. Oh, yes. We have seen it all before. You Christians come here, try hard to change us, get sick and go back to England, or wherever you come from. Only the trader on the coast remains, and even he is not the same white man, year in and year out. We know because we send him women.Tashi is very intelligent, I said. She could be a teacher. A nurse. She could help the people in the village.There is no place here for a woman to do those things, he said.Then we should leave, I said. Sister Corrine and I.No, no, he said.Teach only the boys? I asked.Yes, he said, as if my question was agreement.There is a way that the men speak to women that reminds me too much of Pa. They listen just long enough to issue instructions. They don’t even look at women when women are speaking. They look at the ground and bend their heads toward the ground. The women also do not “look in a man’s face” as they say. To “look in a man’s face” is a brazen thing to do. They look instead at his feet or his knees.
Alice Walker
The crushed teapot in the rubbish of the bulldozed house will sing in your ears forever.
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
She got a long pointed nose and big fleshy mouth. Lips look like black plum. Eyes big, glossy. Feverish. And mean. Like, sick as she is, if a snake cross her path, she kill it
Alice Walker
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
Hard times' is a phrase the English love to use, when speaking of Africa. And it is easy to forget that Africa's 'hard times' were made harder by them.
Alice Walker
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
Then he say something that really surprise me cause it so thoughtful and common sense. When it come to what folks do together with they bodies, he say, anybody's guess is as good as mine. But when you talk about love I don't have to guess. I have love and I have been love. And I thank God he let me gain understanding enough to know love can't be halted just cause some peoples moan and groan.
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
When the ax came into the forest the trees said the handle is one of us.
Alice Walker
I believe that the truth of any subject only comes when all sides of the story are put together.
Alice Walker
Those in power must spend a lot of their time laughing at us.
Alice Walker
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
You telling me God love you, and you ain't never done nothing for him? I mean, not go to church, sing in the choir, feed the preacher and all like that?But if God love me, Celie, I don't have to do all that. Unless I want to. There's a lot of other things I can do that I speck God likes. Like what? I ast. Oh, she say. I can lay back and just admire stuff. Be happy. Have a good time. Well, this sounds like blasphemy sure nuff. 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. 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.
Alice Walker
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.
Alice Walker
Once us feel loved by God, us do the best us can to please him with what us like.
Alice Walker
Hope to sin only in the service of waking up.
Alice Walker
What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears.
Alice Walker
You think you can avoid [pain,] but you actually can't. If you do, you just get sicker, or you feel more pain. But if you can speak it, if you can write it, if you can paint it, it is very healing.
Alice Walker
Every small positive change we make in ourselves repays us in confidence in the future.
Alice Walker
Peace": the fruit of justice done especially to the Self.
Alice Walker
The three wealthiest people in the world own more than the GDP of forty-eight countries!
Alice Walker
There is a way that the men speak to women that reminds me too much of Pa. They listen just long enough to issue instructions. They don’t even look at women when women are speaking. They look at the ground and bend their heads toward the ground.
Alice Walker
Anyhow, I say, the God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgitful, and lowdown.
Alice Walker
Even as I hold you, I am letting you go.
Alice Walker
Even as I hold youI think of you as someone gonefar, far away. Your eyes the colorof pennies in a bowl of dark honeybringing sweet light to someone elseyour black hair slipping through my fingersis the flash of your head goingaround a corneryour smile, breaking before me,the flippant last turnof a revolving door,emptying you out, changed,away from me.Even as I hold youI am letting go.
Alice Walker
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
I live a very secluded life, a very contemplative life and a very meditative one. That is my ideal life.
Alice Walker
When it is all too much; when the news is so bad meditation itself feels useless, and a single life feels too small a stone to offer on the altar of Peace, find a Human Sunrise. Find those people who are committed to changing our scary reality. Human sunrises are happening all over the earth, at every moment. People gathering, people working to change the intolerable, people coming in their robes and sandals or in their rags and bare feet, and they are singing, or not, and they are chanting, or not. But they are working to bring peace, light, compassion, to the infinitely frightening downhill slide of Human life.
Alice Walker
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.
Alice Walker
What that song? I ast. Sound low down dirty to me. Like what the preacher tells you its sin to hear. Not to mention sing.She hum a little more. Something come to me, she say. Something I made up. Something you help scratch out my head.
Alice Walker
Why should the killers of the world be "the future" and not us?
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
Long as I can spell G-o-d I got somebody along.
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
Sofia the kind of woman no matter what she have in her hand she make it look like a weapon.
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
All her young life she has tried to please her father, never quite realizing that, as a girl, she never could.
Alice Walker
What will people say, you running off to Memphis like you don't have a house to look after?Shug say, Albert. Try to think like you got some sense. Why any woman give a shit what people think is a mystery to me.Well, say Grady, trying to bring light. A woman can't git a man if peoples talk.Shug look at me and us giggle. Then us laugh sure nuff. Then Squeak start to laugh. Then Sofia. All us laugh and
Alice Walker
Dear Nettie, I don't write to God no more, I write to you.
Alice Walker
Naw, I say. Mr ____, can tell you, I don't like it at all. What is it to like? He git up on you, heist your nightgown round your waist, plunge in. Most times I pretend I ain't there. He never know the difference. Never ast me how I feel, nothing. Just do his business, get off, go to sleep.She start to laugh. Do his business, she say. Do his business. Why, Miss Celie. You make it sound like he going to the toilet on you.That's what it feel like, I say.She stop laughing.
Alice Walker
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