Quotes from Alice Walker

It just seems clear to me that as long as we are all here, it's pretty clear that the struggle is to share the planet, rather than divide it.

Too much respect for people who are not respectful to you is a sure sign of insecurity.

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.

She look like she ain't long for this world but dressed well for the next.

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.

She look so stylish it like the trees all round the house draw themself up tall for a better look.

There is so much we don't understand. And so much unhappiness comes because of that.

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.

Even as I hold you I think of you as someone gone far, far away. Your eyes the color of pennies in a bowl of dark honey bringing sweet light to someone else your black hair slipping through my fingers is the flash of your head going around a corner your smile, breaking before me, the flippant last turn of a revolving door, emptying you out, changed, away from me. Even as I hold you I am letting go.

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

If you was my wife, she say, I'd cover you up with kisses stead of licks, and work hard for you too.

Keep in mind always the present you are constructing. It should be the future you want.

The years have come and gone without a single word from you. Only the sky above us do we hold in common. I look at it often as if, somehow, reflected from its immensities, I will one day find myself gazing into your eyes.

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.

This is the true wine of astonishment: We are not over when we think we are.

Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear Everything. Dear God.

All her young life she has tried to please her father, never quite realizing that, as a girl, she never could.

Women have to summon courage to fulfill dormant dreams.

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

Not only will your teachers appear, but they will cook new foods for you.

the world has changed: it did not change without your prayers without your faith without your determination to believe in liberation and kindness; without your dancing through the years that had no beat.

We are a people. 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.

One white man on the platform in South Carolina asked us where we were going--we had got off the train to get some fresh air and to dust the grit and dust out of our clothes. When we said Africa he looked offended and tickled too. Niggers going to Africa, he said to his wife. Now I have seen everything.

If he ever listened to poor colored women the world would be a different place, I can tell you.