Quotes from Alice Walker

She got a whole bunch of elephants and turtles everywhere. Some big, some little, some in the fountain, some up under the trees. Turtles and elephants. And all over her house. Curtains got elephants, bedspreads got turtles.

What he beat you for? she ast. For being me and not you.

Shug! I say. God wrote the bible, white folks had nothing to do with it. How come he look just like them, then? she say. Only bigger? And a heap more hair. How come the bible just like everything else they make, all about them doing one thing and another, and all the colored folks doing is gitting cursed? (Walker 2000: 166)

Sugar, she say one day when Shug home, don't you think it be nice if Celie could talk proper? Shug say, She can talk in sign language for all I care.

The mountain of despair has dwindled, and the stone of hope has size and shape, and can be fondled by the eyes and by the hand. But freedom has always been an elusive tease, and in the very act of grabbing for it one can become shackled.

God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don't know what you looking for. Trouble do it for most folks, I think. Sorrow, lord. Feeling like shit. (Walker 2000: 166)

He is a beautiful young man, Celie. Tall and broad-shouldered, with a deep, thoughtful voice. Did I tell you he writes verses? And loves to sing? He's a son to make you proud.

Sometimes I feel mad at her. Feel like I could scratch her hair right off her head. But then I think, Shug got a right to live too. She got a right to look over the world in whatever company she choose. Just cause I love her don't take away none of her rights.

He had no such dreams, certainly. And if he had them, he did not recall them, on rising. Nor could he fathom why this should be so. In fact, dreams, the world of dreams, did not exist for him, as it existed for her. And unlike her, he did not sit before the dwindling fire of their hearth wondering, pondering, nagging the question really, What does this mean?

Only dead people need loud music, you know. I call loud rock 'Dracula music' because you look out, and there are all those dead and deaf and soulless zombies clod-hopping across the floor.

Do his business, she say. Do his business. Why, Miss Celie. You make it sound like he going to the toilet on you.

People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. —Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

I knew how much my mother loved me by her love and patience with my child.

Why aren't you happy in America, if everyone there drives motorcars?

The male effort to separate Wisdom from the realm of the Feminine is not only brutal and unattractive but it will always fail, though this may take, as with Buddhism, thousands of years. This is simply because the Feminine is Wisdom; it is also the Soul.

THEY DO NOT WANT to hear what their children suffer. They've made the telling of the suffering itself taboo.

because part of shaping ourselves is done by others; and a lot of our shaping comes from that one close friend who is something like us. It

Or are they saying simply that they can not and will not be bothered to listen to what is said about an accepted tradition of which they are a part, that has gone on, as far as they know, forever?

He try to give her a compliment, she pass it on to me. After while I git to feeling pretty cute.

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. Yeah? I say. Yeah, she say. It always making little surprises and springing them on us when us least expect.

If every man in this courtroom had had his penis removed, what then? Would they understand better that that condition is similar to that of all the women in this room? That, even as we sit here, the women are suffering from the unnatural constrictions of flesh their bodies have been whittled and refashioned into?

How wearying to think nobody in this courtroom has ever listened to them. I see each one of them as the little child my father was always so concerned about, screaming her terror eternally into her own ear.

God all white too, looking like some stout white man work at the bank.

And one of the most serious things for me has been the understanding that the Universe is not that interested in punishing us. Every move we make is simply part of its reflection.