Quotes from Alice Walker

Now I understand that all great teachers love us. This is essentially what makes them great. I also understand that it is this love that never dies, and that, having once experienced it, we have the confidence always exhibited by well-loved humans, to continue extending this same love.

For her life, like human life everywhere on the planet, had speeded up and speeded up until peace was rarely possible. Always there was movement, noise, inevitable and constant distraction [. ...] a madness had seized the earth. The madness of speed. As if to speed things up meant to actually go somewhere. And where, after all, was there to go? The present is all there ever is, no matter how much you lean forward or back.

I love children say Sofia. But all the colored women that say they love yours is lying. They don't love Reynolds Stanley any more than I do. But if you so badly raise as to ast 'em, what you expect them to say? Some colored people so scared of whitefolks they claim to love the cotton gin.

No one escapes a time in life when the arrow of sorrow, of anger, of despair pierces the heart. For many of us, there is the inevitable need to circle the wound. It is often such a surprise to find it there, in us, when we had assumed arrows so painful only landed in the hearts of other people. Some of us spend decades screaming at the archer. Or at least for longer periods than are good for us. How to take the arrow out of the heart? How to learn to relieve our own pain? That is the question.

Long as I can spell G-o-d I got somebody along.

And to me, wildness means following the growth of love. Like a plant reaching through stone toward the sun-

I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That's how come I know trees fear man.

But it ain't easy, trying to do without God. Even if you know he ain't there, trying to do without him is a strain.

Perhaps this is simply the way it is with writers. It's when they don't see you that you matter. Because then you can belong to them in a way that permits them complete possession. You are determined by them. You are controlled. You are, generally speaking, exaggerated.

Healing begins where the wound was made.

In that story I gathered up the historical and psychological threads of the life my ancestors lived, and in the writing of it I felt joy and strength and my own continuity. I had that wonderful feeling writers get sometimes, not very often, of being with a great many people, ancient spirits, all very happy to see me consulting and acknowledging them, and eager to let me know, through the joy of their presence, that, indeed, I am not alone.

Milovaný chce bejt úplnÄ› vÅ¡ecko. Zpíváme, tancujem, pitvoÃ…â"¢íme se, dáváme si kytky a to vÅ¡ecko v nadÄ›ji že nás nÄ›kdo bude mít rád. VÅ¡imla sis nÄ›kdy že stromy dÄ›laj pÃ…â"¢esnÄ› to samý co my aby na sebe upozornily? Teda až na to že nechodÄ›j.

Susannah was glad that, on principle, she rarely listened to men. Rarely believed, really, a word they said. No matter how much she might love them.

It is as if my self is hiding behind an iron door.

Heaven. Now there's a thought. Nothing has ever been able, ultimately, to convince me we live anywhere else. And that heaven, more a verb than a noun, more a condition than a place, is about leading with the heart in whatever broken or ragged state it's in, stumbling forward in faith until, from time to time, we miraculously find our way.

We do not admire their president. We know why the White House is white. We do not find their children irresistible; We do not agree they should inherit the earth.

Then she added thoughtfully, "And that old woman that turned me off so short got down so bad in the end that she was walking on two sticks." And I knew she was thinking, though she never said it: Here I am today, my eight children healthy and grown and three of them in college and me with hardly a sick day for years. Ain't Jesus wonderful?

But one thing I do thank her for, for teaching me to learn for myself, by reading and studying and writing a clear hand.

But if God love me, Celie, I don't have to do all that. Unless I want to. There's a lot of other things I can do that I speck God likes. Like what? I ast. Oh, she say. I can lay back and just admire stuff. Be happy. Have a good time.

Remnants is an extraordinary gift…a kind of Rosetta Stone of the African American woman's soul – all the 'remnants,' the bits and pieces Rosemarie carefully saved, remembered, nurtured, in her ancestors, relatives and self coming together in this extremely useful compendium of wisdom, of sureness and insight that we will be able to use for generations to come.

May our call be from this day onward, to all the creatures and beings of the planet who have no voice: I have come to you, for you, to be a witness to your life and to extend whatever understanding and happiness I can.

El tiempo se mueve despacio, pero pasa deprisa.

Anyhow, I say, the God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgitful and lowdown. She say, Miss Celie, you better hush. God might hear you. Let 'im hear me, I say. If he ever listened to poor colored women the world would be a different place, I can tell you.

This life soon be over … Heaven last always