Quotes from Alice Walker

It did not seem possible that people would bomb one another rather than talk. What fear was this, that kept silent until announced by the loudest sound on earth, the sound of worlds being destroyed. Was it the fear that ones own terror would be glimpsed, ones own childhood of terror guessed?

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

he never says anything off the top of his head

This, then, was the power people like us had. The power to enslave others and to frustrate their dreams.

her first published book, Once (1965).

She was beginning to think that human beings had underground selves, always running, limpid, clear, even when everything in the personality appeared used up, dusty and dry.

When we have pleaded for understanding, our character has been distorted; when we have asked for simple caring, we have been handed empty inspirational appellations, then stuck in a far corner. When we have asked for love, we have been given children. In short, even our plainer gifts, our labors of fidelity and love, have been knocked down our throats.

Young mothers traveling alone doted on him. He was helpful, modest, quick, and definitely knew his place—they could read this easily in his demeanor—because he, like so many colored men, had perfected the art of doing the most intimate things to and for white people without once appearing to look at them. It was an invaluable skill.

tribal cloth, the magic of which is that as long as it is woven, the tribe exists; as long as you know how to weave it, so do you.

Why do tired people sing?

I'm pore, I'm black, I may be ugly and can't cook, a voice say to everything listening. But I'm here.

And we kneeled down right on deck and gave thanks to God for letting us see the land for which our mothers and fathers cried – and lived and died – to see again

Mientras pueda decir D-i-o-s, sabré que hay alguien conmigo.

But I am not the mother of anybody's children, I said, and I am something

Now he realized he'd probably understood nothing, and it also occurred to him what a superficial, ultimately fraudulent act it was to sleep with a person you did not really know.

maybe it isn't love, maybe it's a chain.

They then started to test the other children, and it was discovered that none of us had sufficient vitamin C, D, or A in our diets. We never had fruit, never had raw leafy greens, never had milk. There was plenty of this on the Island, you know, but it was all sold, every scrap of it, to the mainland, and had been since slavery time.

Shug say, What, too shamefaced to put singing and dancing and fucking together? She laugh. That's the reason they call what us sing the devil's music. Devils love to fuck.

Instead all the women [at the National Black Feminist Organization] understood that we gathered together to assure understanding among black women, and that understanding among women is not a threat to anyone who intends to treat women fairly.

I try to teach my heart not to want nothing it can't have

God is different to us now, after all these years in Africa. More spirit than ever before, and more internal. Most people think he has to look like something or someone — a roofleaf or Christ — but we don't. And not being tied to what God looks like, frees us.

I write all the things I should have been able to read.

White folks is a miracle of affliction.

When he broke that commitment to art, to making beauty, to recording, to bearing witness, to saying yessiree to the life spirit, whose only request sometimes is just that you acknowledge you truly see it, he broke something in Hal.