Alice Walker famous quotes

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.
-- Alice Walker

#Friendship #Memorable #Acceptance

My God is not a religious God. My God is nature, my God is everything there is. That's God. Everything is God. I'm a child of that.
-- Alice Walker

#Religious #Children

Don't wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you've got to make yourself.
-- Alice Walker

#Happiness #Success #Being Happy

Love yourself. Just love yourself. In fact, the love of the self cures every kind of problem you have with yourself. For instance, if someone calls you nappy-headed, it rolls right off your body, if you love nappy hair. Or if someone calls you buck-toothed or too black, that won't be a problem if you love being buck-toothed or black. If you love it, then so what. The development of self-love cures many of the ills that people suffer from.
-- Alice Walker

#Love You #Love Is #Hair

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

#Inspirational #Motivational #Positive

What gardening teaches us is that if you plant things, they'll come up. But you have to be willing to wait for them to bear fruit because things are seasonal.
-- Alice Walker

#Waiting #Gardening #Fruit

It is chilling to think that the same people who persecuted the wise women and men of Europe, its midwives and healers, then crossed the oceans to Africa and the Americas and tortured and enslaved, raped, impoverished, and eradicated the peaceful, Christ-like people they found. And that the blueprint from which they worked, and still work, was the Bible.
-- Alice Walker

#Wise #Ocean #Men

I know from having had a child, and from having been a child myself, that children will copy you. So, the best way to get them to read, is to read. The best way to get them to do anything is to do it yourself, and they will absolutely copy you. That way, you don't have to worry about what's supposedly age appropriate, a child will pick something up when the child is ready.
-- Alice Walker

#Children #Worry #Age

I think the War on Terror is really absurd, especially coming from a country that is founded on terrorism.
-- Alice Walker

#Country #War #Thinking

I feel that all you can do is give it your absolute best with whatever gifts the universe has given you. And if you make it in some way that other people can recognize, that's fine. But even if you don't quote-unquote make it, you're fine, if you've given it your whole heart and soul. You're totally in sync with your purpose and with the universe. And that's fine.
-- Alice Walker

#Heart #People #Giving

She say, Celie, tell the truth, have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show.
-- Alice Walker

#Humorous #Church #Telling The Truth

The earth is for joy, and dancing is a big part of that. And you dance with nature. Nature is always dancing. If you're not harassing it and killing it and mutilating it, nature is dancing. That's what the leaves are doing when the wind blows through them. We live in a magical wonderful universe. And just spoil it while thinking we can at some point go to heaven or some other planet.
-- Alice Walker

#Blow #Thinking #Wind

no person is your friend (or kin) who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow and be perceived as fully blossomed as you were intended. Or who belittles in any fashion the gifts you labor so to bring into the world.
-- Alice Walker

#Friendship #Fashion #Silence

It's better to have your blackness taken away than to stand there and lie about who you actually are. That's the trap.
-- Alice Walker

#Lying #Taken #Traps

For a long time, I thought I was ugly and disfigured. This made me shy and timid, and I often reacted to insults that were not intended.
-- Alice Walker

#Long #Shy #Ugly

In a way, no matter who's in charge of the corporation that the United States is, the direction in which it is taken seems to be inexorable. So, you just get the job of being the front man for four or eight years. Now, most people realize that's what you are.
-- Alice Walker

#Jobs #Taken #Men

I know, in my soul, that to eat a creature who is raised to be eaten, and who never has a chance to be a real being, is unhealthy. It's like...you're just eating misery. You're eating a bitter life.
-- Alice Walker

#Real #Soul #Chance

Decide that you know what you think is good for you and go ahead and do it.
-- Alice Walker

#Thinking

The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate.
-- Alice Walker

#God #Experience #Possibility

I grew up in the South [USA states] under segregation. I know what terrorism feels like - when your father could be taken out in the middle of the night and lynched just because he didn't look like he was in an obeying frame of mind when a white person said something he must do. That's terrorism, too.
-- Alice Walker

#Father #Taken #Night

I love the natural world - it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved.
-- Alice Walker

#People #Culture #World

The forest is the first cathedral. I felt that from the time I was a child. I credit my mother with that. I used to think it came from her Native-American side. Whichever it was, she instinctively connected with nature, and taught me that.
-- Alice Walker

#Mother #Children #Native American

You got to fight them, Celie, she say. I can't do it for you. You got to fight them for yourself. I don't say nothing. I think bout Nettie, dead. She fight, she run away. What good it do? I don't fight, I stay where I'm told. But I'm alive.
-- Alice Walker

#Running #Fighting #Thinking

All my life I had to fight. I had to fight my daddy. I had to fight my brothers. I had to fight my cousins and my uncles. A girl child ain't safe in a family of men. But I never thought I'd have to fight in my own house. She let out her breath. I loves Harpo, she say. God knows I do. But I'll kill him dead before I let him beat me.
-- Alice Walker

#Girl #Cousin #Brother

We will be ourselves and free, or die in the attempt. Harriet Tubman was not our great-grandmother for nothing.
-- Alice Walker

#Happiness #Success #Perseverance

We are a people. A people do not throw their geniuses away. If they do, it is our duty as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children. If necessary, bone by bone.
-- Alice Walker

#Children #People #Genius

Love likes to extend itself. If you receive it in a book - or however you get it - then your duty is to extend it beyond.
-- Alice Walker

#Book #Likes #Duty

I love us so incredibly, insanely deeply; it's almost unbearable to see what we do to ourselves.
-- Alice Walker

#Unbearable

America is America. It's a capitalist system. They [leaders] have enshrined that belief that profit matters more than anything else. The polarization of the society is just the resurfacing of that.
-- Alice Walker

#America #Leader #Matter

You are saying, are you not, I said to Manuelito, that stories have more room in them than ideas? [...] He laughed. That is correct, Señor. It is as if ideas are made of blocks. Rigid and hard. And stories are made of a gauze that is elastic. You can almost see through it, so what is beyond is tantalizing. You can't quite make it out; and because the imagination is always moving forward, you yourself are constantly stretching. Stories are the way spirit is exercised.
-- Alice Walker

#Block #Moving #Ideas

I think America has always been polarized. It's a racist country and it has always been.
-- Alice Walker

#Country #Thinking #America

I am not interested in being a role model, or in fulfilling the expectations of others. I know I am of most use to others and to myself by being this unique self: Nature, I have noticed, is not particularly devoted to copies, and human beings needn't be either.
-- Alice Walker

#Unique #Self #Role Models

I think that indigenous women's wisdom is crucial. So much of the care of the Earth has come from the mothers. I think it's imperative we turn to their wisdom in how to take care of the planet.
-- Alice Walker

#Mother #Thinking #Earth

The only way to solace anyone who loved you in life is to be a good memory
-- Alice Walker

#Memories #Way #Life Is

What I am really interested in is that I want people to be thinking in other ways - to stop thinking they have to remain glued to a system that has failed and to ideas about society that's necessarily about being run by Democrats or Republicans.
-- Alice Walker

#Running #Thinking #Ideas

... my mother adorned with flowers whatever shabby house we were forced to live in.
-- Alice Walker

#Mother #Flower #House

I want a different system entirely. One not seen on this earth for thousands of years. If ever. Democratic Womanism. Notice how this word has "man" right in the middle of it? That's one reason I like it. He is right there, front and center. But he is surrounded. I want to vote and work for a way of life that honors the feminine.
-- Alice Walker

#Men #Years #Honor

War is a dead end, literally. And, what is more, we simply can't afford it. Not morally, and not financially. How long will it take the citizens of the United States, one wonders, to recognize that the house their country bombed in Iraq is the same one they were living in until it was foreclosed?
-- Alice Walker

#Country #War #Iraq

At one point I learned transcendental meditation. This was 30-something years ago. It took me back to the way that I naturally was as a child growing up way in the country, rarely seeing people. I was in that state of oneness with creation and it was as if I didn't exist except as a part of everything.
-- Alice Walker

#Country #Children #Growing Up

When life descends into the pit I must become my own candle Willingly burning my self To light up the darkness around me.
-- Alice Walker

#Light #Self #Darkness

Nature has created us with the capacity to know God, to experience God.
-- Alice Walker

#Faith #Faith In God #Capacity

As an elder of the Americas and of the rest of the planet, it is my responsibility to care for and protect, to the best of my ability, the young.
-- Alice Walker

#Responsibility #Care #Young

we are the ones we have been waiting for
-- Alice Walker

#Confidence #Waiting #African American

Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don't even recognize that growth is happening...Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.
-- Alice Walker

#Long #Waiting #Personality

Anything we love can be saved.
-- Alice Walker

Some people don't understand that it is the nature of the eye to have seen forever, and the nature of the mind to recall anything that was ever known.
-- Alice Walker

#Eye #People #Forever

Human compassion is equal to human cruelty, and it is up to each of us to tip the balance.
-- Alice Walker

#Compassion #Balance #Cruelty

As for those who think the Arab world promises freedom, the briefest study of its routine traditional treatment of blacks (slavery) and women (purdah) will provide relief from all illusion. If Malcolm X had been a black woman his last message to the world would have been entirely different. The brotherhood of Moslem men-all colors-may exist there, but part of the glue that holds them together is the thorough suppression of women.
-- Alice Walker

#Men #Thinking #Color

Every small positive change we make in ourselves repays us in confidence in the future.
-- Alice Walker

#Uplifting #Positive Change

Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.
-- Alice Walker

#Leadership #Peace #Powerful

I'm always amazed that people will actually choose to sit in front of the television and just be savaged by stuff that belittles their intelligence.
-- Alice Walker

#People #Television #Stuff

Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.
-- Alice Walker

#Life #Gratitude #Attitude

You don't need organized religion to connect with the universe. Often a church is the only place you can go to find peace and quiet... But it shouldn't be confused with connecting with one's spirit.
-- Alice Walker

#Wisdom #Confused #Church

He beat me like he beat the children. Cept he don't never hardly beat them. He say, Celie, git the belt. The children be outside the room peeking through the cracks. It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That's how come I know trees fear man.
-- Alice Walker

#Children #Men #Tree

To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.
-- Alice Walker

#Mother #People #Hatred

Well, I think indigenous peoples have ways of living on the Earth that they've had forever. And they've been overrun by organized religion, which has had a lot of money and power.
-- Alice Walker

#Thinking #Forever #Earth

Whenever you are creating beauty around you, you are restoring your own soul.
-- Alice Walker

#Creating #Soul #Creating Beauty

Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength - in search of my mother's garden, I found my own.
-- Alice Walker

#Mother #Garden #Heritage

I have fought and kicked and fasted and prayed and cursed and cried myself to the point of existing.
-- Alice Walker

War will stop when we no longer praise it, or give it any attention at all. Peace will come wherever it is sincerely invited.
-- Alice Walker

#Peace #War #Giving

I think writing really helps you heal yourself. I think if you write long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write, as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame.
-- Alice Walker

#Writing #Thinking #Long

And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see - or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.
-- Alice Walker

#Family #Mother #Flower

I don’t need a certain number of friends, just a number of friends I can be certain of.
-- Alice Walker

#Numbers #Needs #Certain

In each of us, there is a little voice that knows exactly which way to go. And I learned very early to listen to it, even though it has caused so much grief and havoc, and I think that is the only answer.
-- Alice Walker

#Grief #Thinking #Voice

Activism is the rent I pay for living on this planet.
-- Alice Walker

#Helping Others #Pay #Planets

Any God I ever found in church, I brought in myself.
-- Alice Walker

#Church #Found

As long as the Earth can make a spring every year, I can. As long as the Earth can flower and produce nurturing fruit, I can, because I'm the Earth. I won't give up until the Earth gives up.
-- Alice Walker

#Giving Up #Spring #Flower

During my years of being close to people engaged in changing the world I have seen fear turn into courage. Sorrow into joy. Funerals into celebration. Because whatever the consequences, people, standing side by side, have expressed who they really are, and that ultimately they believe in the love of the world and each other enough to be that...
-- Alice Walker

#Believe #Years #People

Clearly older women and especially older women who have led an active life or elder women who successfully maneuver through their own family life have so much to teach us about sharing, patience, and wisdom.
-- Alice Walker

#Patience #Family Life #Teach

People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.
-- Alice Walker

#People #Wish #Literature

Time moves slowly, but passes quickly.
-- Alice Walker

#Moving

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

#Beauty #Beautiful #Nature

War contributes greatly to global warming, which shouldn't surprise us. All those bombs going off, all those rockets, all those planes and helicopters. All that fuel of various kinds being used. It pollutes the air and water of this very fragile and interconnected planet.
-- Alice Walker

#War #Air #Water

It is natural to want to have a future.
-- Alice Walker

#Want #Natural

To acknowledge our ancestors means we are aware that we did not make ourselves, that the line stretches all the way back, perhaps to God; or to Gods. We remember them because it is an easy thing to forget: that we are not the first to suffer, rebel, fight, love and die. The grace with which we embrace life, in spite of the pain, the sorrow, is always a measure of what has gone before.
-- Alice Walker

#Pain #Mean #Fighting

I am an expression of the divine, just like a peach is, just like a fish is. I have a right to be this way...I can't apologize for that, nor can I change it, nor do I want to... We will never have to be other than who we are in order to be successful...We realize that we are as ourselves unlimited and our experiences valid. It is for the rest of the world to recognize this, if they choose.
-- Alice Walker

#Successful #Expression #Order

Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.
-- Alice Walker

#Revolution #Brilliant #Consciousness

Helped are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception and realize a partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful.
-- Alice Walker

#Inspirational #Creativity #Godly

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.
-- Alice Walker

#Country #Ghetto #Thinking

A writer's heart, a poet's heart, an artist's heart, a musician's heart is always breaking. It is through that broken window that we see the world...
-- Alice Walker

#Heart #Artist #Broken

Is solace anywhere more comforting than that in the arms of a sister.
-- Alice Walker

#Inspiring #Sister #Comforting

Activism is my rent for living on the planet.
-- Alice Walker

#Planets #Activism

Wherever I have knocked, a door has opened. Wherever I have wandered, a path has appeared.
-- Alice Walker

#Gratitude #Doors #Path

I try to teach my heart not to want things it cant have.
-- Alice Walker

#Heart #Trying #Want

How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.
-- Alice Walker

#Inspiring #Mother #Simple

Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.
-- Alice Walker

#Death #Inspirational Life #Believe

All History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world.
-- Alice Walker

#Literature #World #Levels

We should learn to accept that change is truly the only thing that's going on always, and learn to ride with it and enjoy it.
-- Alice Walker

#Attitude #Accepting #Should

Israel is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people, both inside Israel and also in the Occupied Territories.
-- Alice Walker

#Israel #People #Territory

The nature of this flower is to bloom.
-- Alice Walker

#Flower

You must learn to love only that which cannot be stolen.
-- Alice Walker

#Love #Stolen

Laughter isn't even the other side of tears. It is tears turned inside out. Truly the suffering is great, here on earth. We blunder along, shredded by our mistakes, bludgeoned by our faults. Not having a clue where the dark path leads us. But on the whole, we stumble along bravely, don't you think?
-- Alice Walker

#Laughter #Mistake #Dark

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

#Love #Heart #Worry

Whenever I have knocked, a door has opened. Wherever I have wandered, a path has appeared. I have been helped, supported, encouraged and nurtured by people of all races, creeds, colors and dreams.
-- Alice Walker

#Dream #Inspirational Love #Race

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

#Hate #War #Men

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.
-- Alice Walker

#Writing #Violence #Sin

I don't know. I imagine good teaching as a circle of earnest people sitting down to ask each other meaningful questions. I don't see it as a handing down of answers...
-- Alice Walker

#Meaningful #Teaching #Circles

Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.
-- Alice Walker

#Mother #Motherhood #Flawed

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

#Inspiring #God #Religious

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.
-- Alice Walker

#Meaningful #Nature #Animal