Quotes from Alice Walker

Why you like this, huh? Why you always think you have to do things your own way? I ast your mama bout it one time, while you was in jail. What she say? ast Sofia. She say you think your way as good as anybody else's. Plus, it yours. Sofia laugh.

Whoever he is, he is not worth all this. And I will never unclench my teeth long enough to tell him so.

T}here is a point at which even grief feels absurd. And at this point, laughter gushes up to retrieve sanity.

Can anything be more boring than an upper-class Englishman?

We'll, you know how nigger is. Can't nobody tell 'em nothing even today. Can't be rule. Every nigger you see got a kingdom in his head.

Every stitch i sew will be a kiss.

The real revolution is always concerned with the least glamorous stuff. With raising a reading level from second grade to third. With simplifying history and writing it down (or reciting it) for the old folks. With helping illiterates fill out a food-stamps form - for they must eat, revolution or not.

I believe that the truth of any subject only comes when all sides of the story are put together.

There is a special grief felt by the children and grandchildren of those who were forbidden to read, forbidden to question or to know.

She look me over from head to foot. Then she cackle. Sound like a death rattle. You sure is ugly, she say, like she ain't believed it.

I do not grieve in the abstract, but in the heart.

Religion is an elaborate excuse for what man has done to women and to the earth

I'm not lesbian; I'm not bisexual; I'm not straight. I'm just curious.

Peace: the fruit of justice done especially to the Self.

What she showed me was, Yes, I am Grandmother as she is; there is no separation, really, between us. And that, on this planet, Grandmother Earth, there is no higher authority. That our inseparability is why the planet will be steered to safety by Grandmother/Grandmothers or it will not be steered to safety at all.

A little love, a little buckshot, that's how I'd say handle yourself.

Well, I say, we all have to start somewhere if us want to do better, and our own self is what us have to hand.

I think humanity has forgotten – this planet is for joy.

Life is very different when you have a good friend. I've seen people without special friends, close friends. Other men, especially. For some reason men don't often make and keep friends. This is a real tragedy, I think, because in a way, without a tight male friend, you never really are able to see yourself.

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.

She thinks her sister has held life always in the palm of one hand, that no is a word the world never learned to say to her.

Let him hear me. If [god] ever listened to poor colored women, the world would be a different place.

As others might prepare for an exam whose subject matter is unknown to them, so I must study, cram, for every conversation with my folks.

The heaving sickness past, her nausea gone, her bodily fluids replaced, she felt the lightness of being in the open space around her. Her walls the canyon's walls, she owned them not at all; her floor, the river beach. Her view, the heavens. It was, this freedom she was in, the longed-for cathedral of her dreams.