Quotes from Alice Walker

Los olinkas no creen que se deba educar a las niñas. Cuando pregunté a una madre por qué pensaba así, me dijo: Una mujer no es nada por sí misma. Solo por su marido puede ser algo. ¿Y qué puede ser?, le pregunté. La madre de sus hijos. Pues yo no soy madre de los hijos de nadie, y sin embargo soy alguien.

But cheer up. Who could have imagined What the world is really like When we were children? We're old now, but in spite of all we learned, So much of it dreadful and scary, even Petrifying, We gave Life Our best shot. Perfection will have To wait for the next incarnation. And I mean of the world, not just us.

I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ast. And that in wondering bout the big things and asting bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, the more I love.

Who can even imagine me looking a strange white man in the eye? It seems to me I have talked to them always with one foot raised in flight, with my head turned in whichever way is farthest from them.

It does not matter to me: wherever you are grieving whether Paris, Damascus, Jerusalem, Bamako, Mexico or Beirut or New York City my heart, too, is bruised and dragging. There used to be such a thing as melodrama when feelings could be made up, but now there is bare pain and sorrow, a sense of endlessly missed opportunities to smile and embrace The other.

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.

But I don't think us feel old at all. And us so happy. Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt.

There is no need to talk, really. It is something humans started a long time ago - I don't even remember why- and they've clung to it. Clinging to speech they've lost their ability to read one another, to feel one another, to know one another at a glance. Or with a sniff. It is entirely within human capability to do this.

You a lowdown dog is what's wrong, I say. It's time to leave you and enter into the Creation. And your dead body just the welcome mat I need.

She look so stylish it like the trees all round the house draw themselves up tall for a better look. Now I see she stumble, tween the two men. She don't seem that well acquainted with her feets. Close up I see all this yellow powder caked up on her face. Red rouge. She look like she ain't long for this world but dressed well for the next.

She say, Nothing but death can keep me from it. She never write.

Don't you dare show me any fear, they seemed to say to one another. Act like nothings happening that I should be frightened of! [...] this is what civilization really meant. What it came to, in the end. Abandonment of the animal fear of annihilation, the scent of suffering. Not wanting to see it in others, not wanting to face it in yourself.

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it. What it do when it pissed off? I ast. Oh, it make something else. People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.

I thought black people superior people. Not simply superior to white people, because even without thinking about it much, I assumed almost everyone was superior to them; but to everyone. Only white people, after all, would blow up a Sunday school class and grin for television over their victory, i.e. , the death of four small black girls.

Perhaps our planet is learning to appreciate the extraordinary wonder of life that surrounds even our suffering, and to say Yes, if through the thickest of tears.

But I don't think us feel old at all. And us so happy. Matter of fact, I think this is the youngest us felt.

none of her innate curiosity about and interest in life had ebbed. She also in no way subscribed to the rules and regulations of a society that suppressed almost all spontaneous signs of joy, and whose insistence on conformity, she had noticed, made life so lacking in vibrancy for all concerned. At the moment she realized any human being might die for almost any reason at any given instant, she also understood that, accepting this fact, she could be free.

Shug act more manly than most men, I mean she upright, honest. Speak her mind and the devil take the hindmost, he say. You know Shug will fight, he say. Just like Sofia. She bound to live her life and be herself no matter what. Mr. -- thin all this is stuff men do. But Harpo not like this, I tell him. You not like this. What Shug got is womanly it seem like to me. Specially since she and Sofia the ones got it.

breaking the heart opens it.

One day she say to me, Well, Miss Celie, I believe it time for me to go. When? I ast. Early next month, she say. June. June a good time to go off into the world.

I remember one time you said your life made you feel so ashamed you couldn't even talk about it to God, you had to write it, bad as you thought your writing was.

She was someone who could not be rushed. This seems a small thing. But it is actually a very amazing quality, a very ancient one. She did everything at just the same pace as before, she could tell the time of day or night by the moisture in the atmosphere, and she went about her business as if she would live forever, and forever was very, very long.

It is the best of times because we have entered a period, if we can bring ourselves to pay attention, of great clarity as to cause and effect.

Thought so sharp it go through me like a pain. Somebody to run to. It seem too sweet to bear.