Alice Walker Quotes

My interest in creating anything is that it be useful.

It is important to remember yourself.

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.

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.

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

I’m the most stubborn person I know.

I think war is so incredibly backward, and I don’t think it’s intelligent, and it’s not sane. So why would you want to support it?

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

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

My family was a poor farming family, and we lived under absolute segregation.

Most damage that others do us is out of fear, humiliation and pain. Those feelings occur in all of us, not just in those of us who profess a certain religious or racial devotion.

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.

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

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.

I was distressed that after 9/11, when the United States was attacked by terrorists, the United States‘ response was to attack Afghanistan, where some of the terrorists had been.

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.

We must, all of us, learn actually not to have enemies, but only confused adversaries who are ourselves in disguise.

My parents were both storytellers. They always spoke with metaphorical richness.

I made my first white women friends in college; they loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered.

In my work and in myself I reflect black people, women and men, as I reflect others. One day even the most self-protective ones will look into the mirror I provide and not be afraid.

Sucking up to the biggies won’t get us anywhere.

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.

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.

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

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

Politically, the world is so confused right now – there’s so much suffering caused by various movements by various parties and people in power in government.

It’s a tragedy, in a way, that Americans are brought up to think that they cannot feel for other people and other beings just because they are different. They think they’re different. It’s very limiting.

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.

A good model of how to ‚work with the enemy‘ internally is presented by the Dalai Lama, in his endless caretaking of his soul as he confronts the Chinese government that invaded Tibet.

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

Fear is real, but so is love.

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

Never be the only one, except, possibly, in your own home.

The quietly pacifist peaceful always die to make room for men who shout.

Since the time of the witch burnings, the grandmothers and the healers and the midwives have been systematically targeted. And burned at the stake for hundreds of years, decimating whole communities.

I feel very happy to be living in Berkeley because there are a lot of people who are politically active here.

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.

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?

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

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

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.

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.

Horses make a landscape look beautiful.

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.

It no longer bothers me that I may be constantly searching for father figures; by this time, I have found several and dearly enjoyed knowing them all.

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 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.

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.

Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors.

I think that wealthy white people would like to have a country that resembles the Fifties, when all the minorities were tucked away in ghettos and paid in very low wages but on the surface it was very bright and shiny and free and the rest of the world would look on it longingly.

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.

I see children, all children, as humanity’s most precious resource, because it will be to them that the care of the planet will always be left.

I’m still living at least five parallel lives, honestly! I wonder about it. I have no idea how that happens.

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.

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

As you know from school, it’s when you have not prepared for the test that you have the fear of failing. And if you have prepared, even if you fail, you’ve done your best.

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

My work is about my life, and what I want to do with it.

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

My mother was very strong. Once, she picked up a coconut and smashed it against my father’s head. It taught me about women defending themselves and not collapsing in a heap.