Top 177 Alice Walker Quotes

Since the time of the witch burnings, the grandmothers and the healers and the midwives have been systematically targeted. And burned at the stake for hundreds of years, decimating whole communities.

There are those who believe Black people possess the secret of joy and that it is this that will sustain them through any spiritual or moral or physical devastation.

June Jordan, who died of cancer in 2002, was a brilliant, fierce, radical, and frequently furious poet. We were friends for thirty years. Not once in that time did she step back from what was transpiring politically and morally in the world. She spoke up, and led her students, whom she adored, to do the same.

The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate.

I think ‘The Color Purple’ is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the need for connection around the globe.

We have to wake up. We have to refuse to be a clone.

Women have to summon up courage to fulfill dormant dreams.

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.

Is solace anywhere more comforting than that in the arms of a sister.

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.

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.

I’m still living at least five parallel lives, honestly! I wonder about it. I have no idea how that happens.

People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.

My parents taught me service – not by saying, but by doing. That was my culture, the culture of my family.

Even with all of the things that are so awful, if you walk into your yard and stay there looking at almost anything for five minutes, you will be stunned by how marvelous life is and how incredibly lucky we are to have it.

Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me.

Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.

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.’

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.

Propaganda is amazing. People can be led to believe anything.

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

As far as a glass ceiling, I feel that all you can do is give it your absolute best with whatever gifts the universe has given you. And if you make it in some way that other people can recognize, that’s fine. But even if you don’t quote-unquote make it, you’re fine if you’ve given it your whole heart and soul.

I start each book when it’s ready and never before.

I know from having had a child, and from having been a child myself, that children will copy you.

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.

Don’t wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you’ve got to make yourself.

My mother had bought a sewing machine for me. When I went away to college, she gave me a sewing machine, a typewriter and a suitcase, and my mother made $17 a week working as a maid 12 hours a day, and she did that for me.

I think Americans generally are not used to working very hard, in terms of working for the collective. I think in our country we have taken individualism to its farthest reaches, possibly.

Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.

Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week.

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

I started writing as a child. But I didn’t think of myself actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something – no, maybe junior – and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.

Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.

You have to give others the opportunity to love who you love. If they don’t accept it, it’s their loss.

Horses make a landscape look beautiful.

Horses make a landscape look beautiful.

My family was a poor farming family, and we lived under absolute segregation.

Can people who hunger so desperately for what other people have ever have enough?

As an elder of the Americas and of the rest of the planet, it is my responsibility to care for and protect, to the best of my ability, the young.

If you deny people their own voice, you’ll have no idea of who they were.

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

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.

The most important question in the world is, ‘Why is the child crying?’

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.

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?

I never talk about my next project.

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.

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.

I think the foundation of everything in my life is wonder.

I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to.

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.

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.

The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one’s people that has not previously been taken into account.

In search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.

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.

You don’t always have to be doing something. You can just be, and that’s plenty.

I think America has always been polarized.

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.

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

Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me.

Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors.

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.

War contributes greatly to global warming, which shouldn’t surprise us. All those bombs going off, all those rockets, all those planes and helicopters. All that fuel of various kinds being used. It pollutes the air and water of this very fragile and interconnected planet.

People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.

As long as the people don’t fear the truth, there is hope. For once they fear it, the one who tells it doesn’t stand a chance. And today, truth is still beautiful… but so frightening.

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.

If you want to have a life that is worth living, a life that expresses your deepest feelings and emotions and cares and dreams, you have to fight for it.

I’m not lesbian; I’m not bisexual; I’m not straight. I’m just curious.