Top 534 Quotes & Sayings by Alice Walker - Page 9

I feel a little peculiar around the children. For one thing, they grown. And I see they think me and Nettie and Shug and Albert and Samuel and Harpo and Sofia and Jack and Odessa real old and don't know much what going on. But I don't think us feel old at all. And us so happy. Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt.

After all, how can a society flourish, a country attain democracy and health, children grow into intelligent beings, sensitive to the needs of an ever more fragile and endangered planet, if half it's people are kept out of the driver's seat?

Just because I don't harass it like some peoples us know don't mean I ain't got religion.

I feel I am a child that's lost its mother. I feel like a calf whose mother has gone off to slaughter.

God is different to us now, after all these years in Africa. More spirit than ever before, and more internal. Most people think he has to look like something or someone- a roofleaf or Christ- but we don't. And not being tied to what God looks like, frees us.

Man corrupt everything, say Shug. He on your box of grits, in your head, and all over the radio. He try to make you think he everywhere. Soon as you think he everywhere, you think he God. But he ain't. Whenever you trying to pray, and man plop himself on the other end of it, tell him to git lost, say Shug. Conjure up the flowers, wind, water, a big rock.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence - as it saves most writers who live in 'interesting' oppressive times and are not afflicted by personal immunity.

Storytelling, you know, has a real function. The process of the storytelling is itself a healing process, partly because you have someone there who is taking the time to tell you a story that has great meaning to them. They're taking the time to do this because your life could use some help, but they don't want to come over and just give advice. They want to give it to you in a form that becomes inseparable from your whole self. That's what stories do. Stories differ from advice in that, once you get them, they become a fabric of your whole soul. That is why they heal you.

The forest is the first cathedral. I felt that from the time I was a child. I credit my mother with that. I used to think it came from her Native-American side. Whichever it was, she instinctively connected with nature, and taught me that.

Even now, I find that no matter what has happened, I still have that trust. I have a lot of trust, that people can be better than they are.

The sight of a Black nun strikes their sentimentality; and, as I am unalterably rooted in native ground, they consider me a work of primitive art, housed in a magical color; the incarnation of civilized, anti-heathenism, and the fruit of a triumphing idea.

But if by some miracle and all our struggle, the earth is spared, only justice to every living being will save humankind.

The Congo is really beautiful. People correct me and say, "Oh, you mean the Democratic Republic of the Congo." Well, fine. But, the land there, the landscape is extraordinary. It's big lakes and beautiful hills and trees.

What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers' time? In our great-grandmothers' day? It is an answer cruel enough to stop the blood.

I come from somewhere and from specific black people in the South, including my parents, who built our first school, and rebuilt it after it was burned to the ground. And they used to bake pies and cakes to raise money to keep it going. So, I learned to struggle from a very early way in a way that was truly indigenous to the South.

Whoever you are, whatever you are, start with that, whether salt of the earth or only white sugar.

I could never live happily in Africa-or anywhere else-until I could live freely in Mississippi.

Books became my world because the world I was in was very hard.

I feel that the ancestors are that covering that will cover me. I feel like I can only be enveloped in them spiritually and physically.

This life soon be over, I say. Heaven last all ways.

Humans - whatever billions we are - we don't have the control. We are considered expendable, basically.

Find yourself a cup of tea; the teapot is behind you. Now tell me about hundreds of things. Saki Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors.

One thing that never ceases to amaze me, along with the growth of vegetation from the earth and of hair from the head, is the growth of understanding.

If a person is hit hard enough, even if she stands, she falls.

We have elders who [are] misguided and wallowing around in troughs of money with the wrong sort. They're not really good elders for the youth to emulate. The youth rightly don't like them.

I'm the kind of woman that likes to enjoy herselves in peace.

I am an elder, and I am delighted to be an elder. I would like to exhibit [and] explore it more - what an elder could mean in this time. But, I'd like to show that elders are good for us - that they can be good for us.

We alone can devalue gold by not caring if it falls or rises in the marketplace. Wherever there is gold there is a chain, you know, and if your chain is gold so much the worse for you.

Dear God...I have always been a good girl. Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me.

I don't know nothing, I think. And glad of it.

Helped are those too busy living to respond when they are wrongfully attacked: on their walks they shall find mysteries so intriguing as to distract them from every blow.

Stretching [and] yoga [are] very helpful. All of these things - they really do help. Good food and a lot of sleep. And reading - reading good books. Sometimes movies - although a lot of the movies are difficult.

Meditation is like the cloak of the good thief. You find a corner or somewhere where you can actually entertain your own self and your own soul, and understand what your work [is] here.

I'm pore, I'm black, I may be ugly and can't cook, a voice say to everything listening. But I'm here.

I know what I'm thinking bout, I think. Nothing. And as much of it as I can.

That is scary, when you consider what we're doing to children all over the planet. They're the ones who are truly being terrorized by all the madness adults are perpetrating.

Love likes to extend itself. If you receive it in a book - or however you get it - then your duty is to extend it beyond.

I grew up in the South [USA states] under segregation. 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. That's terrorism, too.

If she come, I be happy. If she don't, I be content.

You really can't be a good artist if you can't say what you really feel. And people may be offended, but, you know, that's how you feel, and that is your right, and that is your gift as well.

If you don't have the ability or encouragement to use yourself in a physical way, you could become just another talking head. And talking heads run things. That's part of the reason why we're in such a sad state as a planet, because it's all about thinking, and thinking has led to a lot of aggrandizement - taking over [resources] and figuring out how you can steal and leaving people and the planet in an impoverished state.

In the far upper corner of my altar is a photo of Joan Crawford in her most fierce Mommy Dearest mode, just to remind me of some of the cost of everyone's hard-earned sweetness and light.

I'm not being disrespectful of the medium; it's just not as important as the work that I actually do [books].

Drew Dellinger is a deep and courageous poet. How lucky we are!

I know from having had a child, and from having been a child myself, that children will copy you. So, the best way to get them to read, is to read. The best way to get them to do anything is to do it yourself, and they will absolutely copy you. That way, you don't have to worry about what's supposedly age appropriate, a child will pick something up when the child is ready.

Animals were not made for us, or our use. They have their own use, which is just being who they are.

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

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. You're totally in sync with your purpose and with the universe. And that's fine.

Every time I conjure up a rock, I throw it.

You don't really stay attached to things. Life goes on, so you don't really sit around and think about how they are relevant to other people. You hope that whatever you create will be [relevant].

I feel like to be where you need to be - where you know you need to be - is such a high. What could be better?

America is America. It's a capitalist system. They [leaders] have enshrined that belief that profit matters more than anything else. The polarization of the society is just the resurfacing of that.

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.

In our particular society, it is the narrowed and narrowing view of life that often wins.