Quotes from Alice Walker

Look closely at the present you are constructing: it should look like the future you are dreaming.

Expect nothing. Live frugally On surprise. become a stranger To need of pity Or, if compassion be freely Given out Take only enough Stop short of urge to plead Then purge away the need. Wish for nothing larger Than your own small heart Or greater than a star; Tame wild disappointment With caress unmoved and cold Make of it a parka For your soul. Discover the reason why So tiny human midget Exists at all So scared unwise But expect nothing. Live frugally On surprise.

Men make war to get attention. All killing is an expression of self-hate.

I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.

In nature, nothing is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways and they're still beautiful.

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.

Any God I ever found in church, I brought in myself.

The more I wonder, the more I love.

Horses make a landscape look beautiful.

In search of my mother's garden, I found my own.

I think that wealthy white people would like to have a country that resembles the Fifties, when all the minorities were tucked away in ghettos and paid in very low wages but on the surface it was very bright and shiny and free and the rest of the world would look on it longingly.

Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week.

My mother had bought a sewing machine for me. When I went away to college, she gave me a sewing machine, a typewriter and a suitcase, and my mother made $17 a week working as a maid 12 hours a day, and she did that for me.

I feel very happy to be living in Berkeley because there are a lot of people who are politically active here.

I love the women's movement, and I never thought of it as belonging to any particular segment of the population.

I know from having had a child, and from having been a child myself, that children will copy you.

We must begin seeing other creatures as equal. Existence makes us all equal.

I cry so much less than I used to. I used to be one of the most teary people.

I can easily imagine Obama sitting down and talking to any leader - or any person - in the world, with no baggage of past servitude or race supremacy to mar their talks.

I met Howard Zinn in 1961, my first year at Spelman College in Atlanta. He was the tall, rangy, good-looking professor that many of the girls at Spelman swooned over.

I don't call myself a Buddhist. I'm a free spirit. I believe I'm here on earth to admire and enjoy it; that's my religion.

Once us feel loved by God, us do the best us can to please him with what us like.

My mother had handed down respect for the possibilities...and the will to grasp them.

She was so quiet. So reflective. And she could erase herself, her spirit, with a swiftness that truly startled, when she knew the people around her could not respect it.