I cannot claim to have had a hard time publishing.
People tend to think that life really does progress for everyone eventually, that people progress, but actually only some people progress. The rest of the people don’t.
The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn’t want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass.
I don’t have this feeling that 70 is really old.
Sucking up to the biggies won’t get us anywhere.
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.
We must do everything in our power to cease the behaviour that makes children everywhere feel afraid.
‘Thank you’ is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.
I live a very secluded life, a very contemplative life and a very meditative one. That is my ideal life.
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.
Part of what confuses people in times of upheaval is that you’re getting so many different points of view and directions and so and so, how to do this and do that. And a lot of it is written in a language that honestly most people cannot understand.
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.
Women have to summon up courage to fulfill dormant dreams.
Never be the only one, except, possibly, in your own home.
Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.
Fear is real, but so is love.
At Sarah Lawrence, I realized that everybody was already what they were going to be. The painters were painting, the writers writing, the dancers dancing. And nobody wore any makeup. The art was uppermost.
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.
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.
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.
We must, I believe, start teaching our children the sanity of nonviolence much earlier.
In search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.
I love the natural world – it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved.
One child must never be set above another, even in casual conversation, not to mention in speeches that circle the globe.
Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.
I consider the fact that thousands of children die each day from starvation and a lack of medicine a crisis for humanity and a problem we must collectively attempt to solve.
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.
In the summer of 1966, I went to Mississippi to be in the heart of the civil-rights movement, helping people who had been thrown off the farms or taken off the welfare roles for registering to vote. While working there, I met the civil-rights lawyer I later married – we became an interracial couple.
How long will it take the citizens of the United States, one wonders, to recognize that the house their country bombed in Iraq is the same one they were living in until it was foreclosed?
My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.
I never talk about my next project.
I wanted in my lifetime to vote for a radical Native American woman, since my vision of any future that we might have is that it will be led by women and older women.
Women have to be extremely careful about choosing something that they consider an act of defiance that can really be used to further their enslavement.
All History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world.
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.
Some people are painters, and some are ballet dancers, and I’m a writer.
America is not nearly done. We’re only in the beginning. Who knows who we will be? Who knows… what color we will be? It is all something that, maybe, our descendants – if they survive that long – will see.
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.
Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.
It is natural to want to have a future.
I have never felt that the one thing that I am ‘known for’ is what I am.
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.
I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.
Language is an intrinsic part of who we are and what has, for good or evil, happened to us.
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.
It’s not possible to stop love.
For a long time, I thought I was ugly and disfigured. This made me shy and timid, and I often reacted to insults that were not intended.
All History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world.
‘Thank you’ is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.
Helped are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception and realize a partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful.
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.
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.
I just feel that ‘The Color Purple,’ which was my 10th book, was a true gift from my ancestors.
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.
You don’t always have to be doing something. You can just be, and that’s plenty.
I deeply regret any harm, or any perceived harm, that I may have done to anyone by any behaviour of mine.
So many killings of black men in my lifetime. The physical shock is astounding.
Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.
From infancy, I have relied on the fiercely sweet spirits of black men; and this is abundantly clear in my work.
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.
The dropping of bombs on people – isn’t that terrorism?
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.
I used to meditate all the time in bed. That was when I was raising my daughter, and I’d get her up and off to school, and then I would go back to bed and meditate. And then I would do the same in the evening, and that was very good for that period because I had so many things to juggle as a single mother.
I never have an intended audience. I just write, you know.
I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.
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.
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.
I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.
Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.
What the mind doesn’t understand, it worships or fears.
We must begin seeing other creatures as equal. Existence makes us all equal.
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.
