Quotes from Alice Walker

The life of my people is to remember forever; each head granary is full. The life of your people is to forget: your thing granaries (museums), and not yourselves, are full.

Then he say something that really surprise me cause it so thoughtful and common sense. When it come to what folks do together with they bodies, he say, anybody's guess is as good as mine. But when you talk about love I don't have to guess. I have love and I have been love. And I thank God he let me gain understanding enough to know love can't be halted just cause some peoples moan and groan.

Hard to be Christ too, say Shug. But he manage. Remember that. Thou Shalt Not Kill, He said. And probably wanted to add on to that, Starting with me. He knowed the fools he was dealing with.

God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it.

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.

Always with me was the inner twin: my true nature, my true self. It is timeless, free, compassionate and in love with whatever is natural to me.-

World wars have been fought and lost; for every war is against the world and every war against the world is lost.

When Toni Morrison said she writes the kind of books she wants to read, she was acknowledging the fact that in a society in which "accepted literature" is so often sexist and racist and otherwise irrelevant or offensive to so many lives, she must do the work of two. She must be her own model as well as the artist attending, creating, learning from, realizing the model, which is to say, herself.

When I no longer have your heart I will not request your body your presence or even your polite conversation. I will go away to a far country separated from you by the sea — on which I cannot walk — and refrain even from sending letters describing my pain.

Some people think politeness is an invitation to invade.

HELPED are those who love the entire cosmos rather than their own tiny country, city, or farm, for to them will be shown the unbroken web of life and the meaning of infinity.

Without money of one's own in a capitalist society, there is no such thing as independence.

Shug Avery sat up in bed a little today. I wash and comb out her hair. She got the nottiest, shortest, kinkiest hair I ever saw, and I loves every strand of it.

I think Africans are very much like white people back home, in that they think they are the center of the universe and that everything that is done is done for them.

I feel peace with the world.

You are saying, are you not, I said to Manuelito, that stories have more room in them than ideas? [...] He laughed. That is correct, Señor. It is as if ideas are made of blocks. Rigid and hard. And stories are made of a gauze that is elastic. You can almost see through it, so what is beyond is tantalizing. You can't quite make it out; and because the imagination is always moving forward, you yourself are constantly stretching. Stories are the way spirit is exercised.

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.

First time I think about the world. What the world got to do with anything, I think. Then I see myself sitting there quilting tween Shug Avery and Mr ——. Us three set together gainst Tobias and his fly speck box of chocolate. For the first time in my life, I feel just right.

Standing beside the river, realizing that the water of earth is recycled forever, she deeply understood this: that there are two presents. One is of the moment. The other is of a longer moment - the moment that includes the history and knowledge one knows. So that, she mused, if the tears shed by the mother of Isis are now part of this river then I am somehow connected to her in this longer present that I am able to envision and that contains both of us.

It has been proved that the land can exist without the country - and be better for it; it has not been proved that the country can live without the land.

there was no sympathy for struggle that ended in defeat. Which meant there was no sympathy for struggle itself—only for "winning.

She saw poetry where other writers merely saw failure to cope with English.

What is always needed in the appreciation of art, or life, is the larger perspective. Connections made, or at least attempted, where none existed before, the straining to encompass in one's glance at the varied world the common thread, the unifying theme through immense diversity, a fearlessness of growth, of search, of looking, that enlarges the private and the public world. And yet, in our particular society, it is the narrowed and narrowing view of life that often wins

Loving humans means writing poems & songs novels & plays, slogans, chants & protest signs our critics want to stone us for while we think of them as people under different circumstances we might be able to help