Quotes from Alice Walker

Can you picture it at all, Celie? Because I felt like i was seeing black for the first time. And Celie, there is something magical about it. Because the black is so black the eye is simply dazzled, and there is the shining that seems to come, really from moonlight, it is so luminous, but their skin glows even in the sun.

June a good time to go off into the world

The world was almost at the point of forgetting what a fine time people can have helping one other. That people like to work together and to kick back after work and share their expansiveness. What would happen if our foreign policy centered on the cultivation of joy rather than pain?

Two old fools left over from love

How peculiar it feels to speak about health care in America taking care of people's health while our government bombs the limbs off children in faraway lands. And starves and imprisons not a few of them at home. How odd that it seems not obviously known that true health care must mean, at minimum, deliberate non-harming of anyone?

Until you do right by me, I say, everything you even dream about will fail.

Even if we live forever, we'll never get to a place where we can honestly say: There's nothing happening here; I'm bored. Or, you can be bored, I guess, but you can never say it's because nothing is happening. Something is always happening. In fact, everything is always happening .

The grace with which we embrace life, in spite of the pain, the sorrows, is always a measure of what has gone before

We were not meant to suffer so much and learn nothing.

I talk to myself a lot, standing in front the mirror. Celie, I say, happiness was just a trick in your case. Just cause you never had any before Shug, you thought it was time to have some, and that it was gon last. Even thought you had the trees with you. The whole earth. The stars. But look at you. When Shug left, happiness desert.

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking that they don't have any.

Tashi dice que quiere enfrentarse al pelotón de fusilamiento vestida de rojo. Le recuerdo que su sentencia está siendo apelada. También cabe la esperanza de que los Estados Unidos hagan valer la ciudadanía norteamericana de Tashi. Es igual, quiero ir de rojo, dice, pase lo que pase. Estoy harta del blanco y el negro. Ninguno va primero. El rojo, el color de la sangre de mujer, los precede a ambos. De modo que cosemos.

You telling me I won't even be able to love my own say, say Miss Eleanor Jane. No, say Sofia. That's not what I'm telling you. I'm telling you I won't be able to love your own son. You can love him just as much as you want to. But be ready to suffer the consequences. That's how the colored live.

What that song? I ast. Sound low down dirty to me. Like what the preacher tells you its sin to hear. Not to mention sing. She hum a little more. Something come to me, she say. Something I made up. Something you help scratch out my head.

you must live in the world today as you wish everyone to live in the world to come. That can be your contribution. Otherwise, the world you want will never be formed. Why? Because you are waiting for others to do what you are not doing; and they are waiting for you, and so on. The planet goes from bad to worse.

The mysterious inner life that she had imagined gave them a secret joy was simply a full knowledge of the fact that they were dead, living just enough for their children.

I thank everybody in this book for coming. -A.W., AUTHOR AND MEDIUM

It seems wiser to do as hermit crabs do, find a shell and inhabit it.

no person is a friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow

The more powerful the powerful appear the more invisible they become, said Armando. This used to work differently than now. In the old days it was said that the powerful merged with the divine and the divine was all that one saw. But now the powerful have merged with the shadow, really with death, and when you encounter them they are really hard to see.

Para mí es un misterio que a una mujer tenga que importarle ni un comino lo que la gente pueda pensar de ella.

Because you rubbed my shoulder last night a poem traveled down my arm.

We recall that to the Cherokee, as to other people who have noticed how long it sometimes takes for humans to develop fully, adulthood comes--if it is coming at all--at the age of fifty-two.

People who think nonviolence is easy don't realize that it's a spiritual discipline that requires a great deal of strength, growth, and purging of the self so that one can overcome almost any obstacle for the good of all without being concerned about one's own welfare.