Top 534 Quotes & Sayings by Alice Walker
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American novelist Alice Walker.
Last updated on November 25, 2024.
I don't call myself a Buddhist. I'm a free spirit. I believe I'm here on earth to admire and enjoy it; that's my religion.
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.
You don't always have to be doing something. You can just be, and that's plenty.
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 think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.
No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.
I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.
What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears.
We must, I believe, start teaching our children the sanity of nonviolence much earlier.
Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.
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.
Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.
The most important question in the world is, 'Why is the child crying?'
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.
Women have to summon up courage to fulfill dormant dreams.
Propaganda is amazing. People can be led to believe anything.
Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week.
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.
Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors.
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.
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.
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.
Sexuality is one of the ways that we become enlightened, actually, because it leads us to self-knowledge.
In search of my mother's garden, I found my own.
Is solace anywhere more comforting than that in the arms of a sister.
In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they're still beautiful.
I'm not lesbian; I'm not bisexual; I'm not straight. I'm just curious.
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.
Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.
I can be almost terminally grief-stricken because things are so dire, but at the same time, there's a real lightheartedness about just the recoverability of life, of how things change, how they're not the same, ever again.
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.
All History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world.
Horses make a landscape look beautiful.
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.
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.
Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.
How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.
I think the foundation of everything in my life is wonder.
You know how big love is? Love is big. love can hold anger; love can even hold hatred.
If you deny people their own voice, you'll have no idea of who they were.
The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one's people that has not previously been taken into account.
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.
We must, all of us, learn actually not to have enemies, but only confused adversaries who are ourselves in disguise.
Don't wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you've got to make yourself.
'Thank you' is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is a wonderful planet, and it is being completely destroyed by people who have too much money and power and no empathy.
I try to teach my heart not to want things it can't have.
The fact is that when you do something from your heart, you leave a heart print.
Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.
People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.
Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.
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.
Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.
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.
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