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Home: Alice Walker Quotes

Alice Walker Quotes

Author
Born On
1944-02-09
Birth Place
Eatonton
Birth Sign
aquarius
Father
Willie Lee Walker
Mother
Minnie Lou Tallulah Grant
Spouse
Melvyn Leventhal
Nationality
American
Education
Spelman College, 1965 - Sarah Lawrence College
Writers, Activists, Women's Rights Activists

One day, Rudolph P. Byrd, founding director of the ‘James Weldon Johnson Institute’, asked ‘Pulitzer’ Prize-winning author, Alice Walker what similarities do the places Dharamshala (an Indian town) and Gaza share. The question hinted at the trip to Dharamshala’s Tibetan camp that this brilliant writer was supposed to take, after which Walker intended on returning to Gaza. Alice said that both Tibetans and Palestinians have suffered the same fate with regards to their homeland. Their territories have been attacked, homes seized and cultural values destroyed. Both these communities bear the brunt of homelessness and identity crisis. There is no difference between the torture meted out by the Israeli and Chinese governments towards these people.

Apart from the political turmoil that these two coteries have been enduring, they also share an affinity for spirituality, nature, art, music and more importantly agriculture. Thus, it is implied that both the Tibetans and the Palestinians are proud owners of a rich cultural heritage. For Walker, these characteristics are appealing and she says that this is one of the reasons why this activist-writer identifies with both of them. She declares, “Whenever I encounter people who love their olive and fruit trees, their tomatoes, vegetables, and land, the farmer in me joins hands with them. I need no other, more political connection. But this is because of my paganism, no doubt. My belief that nature and we and “God/Goddess” are one and the same.”

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.

Nature
Alice Walker

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they're still beautiful.

Nature Nothing
Alice Walker

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.

People
Alice Walker

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

Sister
Alice Walker

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.

Change
Alice Walker

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.

Friendship Silence
Alice Walker

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

People Power Thinking
Alice Walker

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

People Happiness
Alice Walker

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

Alice Walker

'Thank you' is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.

Prayer
Alice Walker

Sexuality is one of the ways that we become enlightened, actually, because it leads us to self-knowledge.

Alice Walker

What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears.

Mind
Alice Walker

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

Appearance People Wish
Alice Walker

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

World
Alice Walker

All History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world.

World History
Alice Walker

Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.

Nothing Surprise
Alice Walker

Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.

Power
Alice Walker

Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.

Poetry Revolt Revolution
Alice Walker

I understood at a very early age that in nature, I felt everything I should feel in church but never did. Walking in the woods, I felt in touch with the universe and with the spirit of the universe.

Age Nature Universe Walking
Alice Walker

Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors.

Alice Walker

Horses make a landscape look beautiful.

Alice Walker

Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.

Alice Walker

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.

Good Life
Alice Walker

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

Alice Walker

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.

Love Fall Imagination
Alice Walker

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

Death Life
Alice Walker

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.

Life
Alice Walker

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.

Good Art
Alice Walker

Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?

Flowers
Alice Walker

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

Alice Walker

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

People
Alice Walker

Human beings may well be unable to break free of the dictatorship of greed that spreads like a miasma over the world, but no longer will we be an inarticulate and ignorant humanity, confused by our enslavement to superior cruelty and weaponry.

Autocracy World Humanity
Alice Walker

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.

Truth Hope
Alice Walker

I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.

Love Heart Honor
Alice Walker

For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle; and one faces down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged.

Battles Freedom
Alice Walker

I deeply regret any harm, or any perceived harm, that I may have done to anyone by any behaviour of mine.

Alice Walker

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.

People Women World
Alice Walker

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

People Society Being Alone
Alice Walker

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

Love
Alice Walker

This is a wonderful planet, and it is being completely destroyed by people who have too much money and power and no empathy.

Money People Power
Alice Walker

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

Alice Walker

Clearly older women and especially older women who have led an active life or elder women who successfully maneuver through their own family life have so much to teach us about sharing, patience, and wisdom.

Family Life Wisdom Women
Alice Walker

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.

Life
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.

Flowers
Alice Walker

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.

Creativity Universe
Alice Walker

How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.

Alice Walker

We must, I believe, start teaching our children the sanity of nonviolence much earlier.

Alice Walker

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.

Country
Alice Walker

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

Heart
Alice Walker

I try to teach my heart not to want things it can't have.

Things Heart
Alice Walker

I think that I do feel that my nature is to express what this self, this particular self at this time, experiences in the world. And that is so organic - I use this metaphor a lot but I'll use it again - it's like a pine tree producing pine cones, or a blackberry bush producing blackberries - it's just what happens with this being, now.

Nature Time World
Alice Walker

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.

Life People Progress Rest
Alice Walker

We must begin seeing other creatures as equal. Existence makes us all equal.

Alice Walker

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.

Life Happiness
Alice Walker

I live a very secluded life, a very contemplative life and a very meditative one. That is my ideal life.

Life
Alice Walker

Fiction is such a world of freedom, it's wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.

World Freedom
Alice Walker

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.

Conduct People
Alice Walker

The dropping of bombs on people - isn't that terrorism?

People Terrorism
Alice Walker

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

Rest
Alice Walker

People have so many hang-ups about how other people live their lives. People always want to keep you in a little box, or they need to label you and fix you in time and location.

People Time
Alice Walker

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.

Culture Women
Alice Walker

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.

People Duty Future
Alice Walker

It is justice and respect that I want the world to dust off and put - without delay, and with tenderness - back on the head of the Palestinian child. It will be imperfect justice and respect because the injustice and disrespect have been so severe. But I believe we are right to try.

Respect World Justice
Alice Walker

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

Alice Walker

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.

Life
Alice Walker

I think writing really helps you heal yourself. I think if you write long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write, as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame.

Money
Alice Walker

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.

Soul Women Flowers
Alice Walker

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.

Family Relationship Women
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

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.

America Time
Alice Walker

I think the War on Terror is really absurd, especially coming from a country that is founded on terrorism.

Country Terrorism Wars
Alice Walker

I'm entirely interested in people, and also other creatures and beings, but especially in people, and I tend to read them by emotional field more than anything. So I have a special interest in what they're thinking and who they are and who's hiding behind those eyes and how did he get there, and what's the story, really?

People Thinking Eyes
Alice Walker

It is natural to want to have a future.

Future
Alice Walker

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Violence
Alice Walker

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.

Money People
Alice Walker

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.

Nothing Capitalism
Alice Walker

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.

Women
Alice Walker

I grew up in the South under segregation. So, I know what terrorism feels like - when your father could be taken out in the middle of the night and lynched just because he didn't look like he was in an obeying frame of mind when a white person said something he must do. I mean, that's terrorism, too.

Night Mind
Alice Walker

Meditation has been a loyal friend to me. It has helped me write my books.

Friendship Books Meditation
Alice Walker

Israel is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people, both inside Israel and also in the Occupied Territories.

People
Alice Walker

When I was 18, I went to the Soviet Union. I kept hearing that America was planning to bomb them - lots of bombs were going to come down on these people. I went there not knowing anything, except that I thought the whole thing was stupid and that I wanted to see who these people were that we were going to bomb.

America People
Alice Walker

There's an ecstatic side to writing. It's like jazz. It just has a life.

Life Jazz
Alice Walker

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

My life is not to be somebody else's impact - you know what I mean?

Life
Alice Walker

You know how big love is? Love is big. love can hold anger; love can even hold hatred.

Love Anger
Alice Walker

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.

Time
Alice Walker

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.

Past World
Alice Walker

For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn't poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.

Greatness Poetry Journalism
Alice Walker

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.

People Future
Alice Walker

If we want to fight people in the world, we should fight them with pillows - pillows stuffed with food, medicine, music... That would be so much cheaper than bombs.

Music People World Food
Alice Walker

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

People
Alice Walker

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

Life
Alice Walker

All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.

Society Experience
Alice Walker

David Icke reminded me of Malcolm X.

Alice Walker

I have never felt that the one thing that I am 'known for' is what I am.

Alice Walker

Well, I think indigenous peoples have ways of living on the Earth that they've had forever. And they've been overrun by organized religion, which has had a lot of money and power.

Money Power Earth
Alice Walker

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.

College
Alice Walker

I love us so incredibly, insanely deeply; it's almost unbearable to see what we do to ourselves.

Love
Alice Walker

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

Experience
Alice Walker

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.

Nature Earth
Alice Walker

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