Quotes from Alice Walker

Si viene, yo feliz. Si no, contenta. Y entonces caigo en que puede que ésta sea la lección que yo tenía que aprender.

Even on those days the news is fully bad. And all you can do is get out of bed and failing that give thanks you have a bed not to get out of.

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.

I dead parting from them because in the short time we've been together they've been like family to me. Like family might have been, I mean.

Whether we reach this inner state of recognized divinity through prayer, meditation, dancing, swimming, walking, feeding the hungry or enriching the impoverished is immaterial. We will be doubly bereft without some form of practice that connects us, in a caring way, to what begins to feel like a dissolving world.

I wish you were with me, or I with you.

It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That's how come I know trees fear man.

It's worse than unwelcome, said Samuel. The Africans don't even see us. They don't even recognize us as the brothers and sisters they sold.

They think they can kill a continent—people, trees, buffalo—and then fly off to the moon and just forget about it. But you and me we're going to remember the people, the trees and the fucking buffalo. Goddammit.

Pero si hablamos de amor, ahí no valen opiniones. Porque yo sé lo que es. Yo he amado y he sido amado. Y bendigo a Dios por haberme dado suficientes luces para saber que al amor no hay quien lo pare, por más que algunos gruñen y protesten.

La experiencia. Más tarde o más temprano, todos acabamos por tenerla. Para eso, lo único que hay que hacer es ir viviendo.

There was a saying among the Mundo: It takes only one lie to unravel the world.

How we come into this world, how we are ushered in, met, and hopefully embraced upon arrival, impacts the whole of our time on earth.

The news always sound crazy. People fussing and fighting and pointing fingers at other people, and never even looking for no peace.

She used to read to us without pity; forcing words, lies, other folks' habits, whole lives upon us two, sitting trapped and ignorant underneath her voice. She washed us in a river of make-believe, burned us with a lot of knowledge we didn't necessarily need to know.

When I was a child I read books for entertainment and information; I now think of books as lifeboats.

He love looking at Shug. I love looking at Shug. But Shug don't love looking at but one of us. Him. But that the way it spose to be. I know that. But if that so, why my heart hurt me so?

That though the heart is breaking, happiness can exist in a moment, also.

But I don't want you to fight 'em until you gits completely fagged so that you turns into a black cracker yourself! For then they bondage over you in complete.

continuing to love with depth and tenderness honors revolution at its highest success.

I don't know who tried to teach him what to do in the bedroom, but it must have been a furniture salesman.

I think of the meaning of the word testimony. Originally it named the custom of two men holding each other's testicles in a gesture of trust, later to metamorphose into the handshake.

A foot. Remember how DuBois saw those human feet in a butcher's window in downtown Atlanta? Brother, Sister, Children, you are not crazy to feel crazy here.

I wash her body, it feels like I'm praying. My hands tremble and my breath short.