Top 534 Quotes & Sayings by Alice Walker - Page 8

Helped are those who forgive; their reward shall be forgetfulness of every evil done to them. It will be in their power, therefore, to envision the new Earth. -----“The Gospel According to Shug

The animals of the planet are in desperate peril... Without free animal life I believe we will lose the spiritual equivalent of oxygen.

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.

Eventually I knew what hair wanted; it wanted to be itself ... to be left alone by anyone, including me, who did not love it as it was.

Progress' affects few. Only revolution can affect many.

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.

I'm where I need to be, so my heart is light. Whatever happens, I know - I mean, I feel - that this is absolutely where I should be and I've lived up to my own expectations.

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.

I don't focus on criticism. I prefer to praise people and the world, rather than criticize them and it.

Artists are messengers whose responsibility is to unite the world -- a faith that will lead not to destruction but to transformation.

I think I've actually returned to a kind of realism about how the world works. That's helpful. Because 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.

No matter how hidden the cruelty, no matter how far off the screams of pain and terror, we live in one world. We are one people.

Listen, God loves everything you love, and a mess of stuff you don't.

...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.

It matters to me that I feel loved by the universe - and I do.

Critics don't really affect the fact that we live in this paradise and what the meaning of that [is]. And what luck to have this!

My great-great-great-grandmother walked as a slave from Virginia to Eatonton, Georgia... It is in memory of this walk that I chose to keep and to embrace my "maiden" name, Walker.

Just be what it is that you are, and that is just fine. You don't have to be what you're not in any way. Live that and live that fully, and that is where you discover ecstasy. You can't really have ecstasy as something other than yourself

You must run around like a crazy person or walk sedately honoring the dead.

People will say to you, "Oh, you are fearless." That is so not true. We should stop saying that about people. It's a slander, really.

I love my own culture. I love my African-American culture very deeply, and I know it deserves to be honored. You have to be aware that people are suffering unjustly, and given our own history we have a duty to stand for the people who are being treated like our parents and grandparents and children were treated.

You can love yourself spiritually, physically-in almost any way that anybody else can.

In order to be able to live at all in America I must be unafraid to live anywhere in it, and I must be able to live in the fashion and with whom I choose.

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.

How sad now never to see men holding hands, while everywhere one looks they are holding guns.

My ancestors make up the skin of the world. That's who that is. That's what that is. That's us.

What gardening teaches us is that if you plant things, they'll come up. But you have to be willing to wait for them to bear fruit because things are seasonal.

We're going to have to debunk the myth that Africa is a heaven for black people -- especially black women. We've been the mule of the world there and the mule of the world here.

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.

Howard Zinn helped us desegregate Atlanta. That was moving because he took a lot of abuse for that. He and Staughton Lynd, a fellow professor who was also from the North, stood with us. They were certainly behind us. In fact, they often stood in front of us. This had a huge impact on me. But one of the reasons I was very careful about speaking about the relationship I had with him and Staughton was because, in a racist society, if you acknowledge a deep love for and a deep debt owed to white teachers, they tend to discredit your own parents and your own community.

I am not convinced that men and women were ever meant to share the same house, though some people can do it beautifully.

There is always a moment in any kind of struggle when one feels in full bloom. Vivid. Alive. One might be blown to bits in such a moment and still be at peace.

human animals and nonhuman animals can communicate quite well; if we are brought up around animals as children we take this for granted. By the time we are adults we no longer remember.

I don't know if you actually get something out of writing poetry. I think poetry is an autonomous muse that decides to come and sit on your couch.

The original crime of niggers and lesbians is that they prefer themselves.

But it ain't easy, trying to do without God even if you know he ain't there, trying to do without him is a strain

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

Everything wanna be loved. Us sing and dance, and holla just wanting to be loved.

Oh, Celie, unbelief is a terrible thing. And so is the hurt we cause others unknowingly.

Anything that forces you to act at the possible harm of your own existence is going to exact a cost. You have to then think about, "Can I pay this? What will this mean to me - to my relationships, to my family, to everybody? What is this going to take? How much of me is this going to take?"

I think I'm led by spirit. I think I'm led by a sense of what is right and what feels good to me - what I accept, what is joyful, what is positive. I see my mission, in a way, as carrying that forward - not so much by preaching, but by embodiment.

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.

Honestly, that is the most important thing to me: Can I continue to live up to my own expectations of myself - and not fall back into slacking?

Abortion is an act of self-defense.

The world is changing. It is no longer a world just for boys and men

The hardest part is when you're in danger yourself. You have to face what could happen and might be likely to happen to you. It's not just that you're there standing next to somebody that something bad is likely to happen to. That is a true moment of reckoning with who you really are.

HELPED are those whose every act is a prayer for peace; on them depends the future of the world.

Writing poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before.

Well, sometime Mr —— git on me pretty hard. I have to talk to Old Maker. But he my husband. I shrug my shoulders. This life soon be over, I say. Heaven last all ways. You ought to bash Mr —— head open, she say. Think bout heaven later.

Some colored people so scared of whitefolks they claim to love the cotton gin.

It's better to have your blackness taken away than to stand and lie about who you actually are.

Expect nothing, live frugally on surprise. Become a stranger to need of pity. Or if compassion be freely given out, take only enough. Stop short of the urge to plead, then purge away the need. Wish for nothing larger than your own small heart or greater than a star. Tame wild disappointment with caress, unmoved and cold. Make of it a parka for your soul. Discover the reason why so tiny human midget exists at all, so scared and so unwise. But expect nothing, live frugally on surprise.

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.

Listen, God love everything you love - and a mess of stuff you don't. But more than anything else, God love admiration. You saying God vain? I ast. Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it. What it do when it pissed off? I ast. Oh, it make something else. People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.

Odinary people don't have a feeling of being loved by the people who manage to get into positions of leadership. They get in there, they make a lot of money, and then they play games with us.

You're not here just to be a clone. You're not here to be a copy. We have enough of those. You don't have to apply. You don't even have to go there to be absolutely yourself - real, here, now, on this planet.

Like I said...fine with me.

I think if I could not get myself off my cushion, off my couch, or away from whatever I'm eating - or drinking or partying or whatever - if I couldn't get away from that, I would have a heavy heart.

Only dead people need loud music, you know.

How anyone cannot see that Nature is God is amazing to me: that they'd rather worship something that can only exist, really, in their own minds.