Quotes by Alice Walker
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My interest in creating anything is that it be useful.

I started writing as a child. But I didn't think of myself actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something -- no, maybe junior -- and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.

I never have an intended audience. I just write, you know.

It's a tragedy, in a way, that Americans are brought up to think that they cannot feel for other people and other beings just because they are different. They think they're different. It's very limiting.

Once you feel loved by the universe, you're already accepted, and you're not really concerned about offending people.

At Sarah Lawrence, I realized that everybody was already what they were going to be. The painters were painting, the writers writing, the dancers dancing. And nobody wore any makeup. The art was uppermost.

I'm tri-racial: African-American, Native American and Euro -- that's the Scotch-Irish part.

Some writers sit down without a thought of what they are going to say, and they go through draft after draft.

It is important to remember yourself.

You have to give others the opportunity to love who you love. If they don't accept it, it's their loss.

Nobody has ever convinced me that race is real.

I cannot claim to have had a hard time publishing.

On a spiritual level, it's as though with my sighted eye I see what's before me, and with my unsighted eye I see what's hidden. It's illuminated life more than darkened it.

If you deny people their own voice, you'll have no idea of who they were.

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

Part of our tradition as black women is that we are universalists. Black children, yellow children, red children, brown children, that is the black woman's normal, day-to-day relationship. In my family alone, we are about four different colors.

I believe you mother everybody, not in a cloying, hovering way, but taking care of what is around you.

I have a collective sense of suffering.

My parents were both storytellers. They always spoke with metaphorical richness.

It's very hard for our parents who see us enter a world that they can't imagine.

I think 'The Color Purple' is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the need for connection around the globe.

As long as the people don't fear the truth, there is hope. For once they fear it, the one who tells it doesn't stand a chance. And today, truth is still beautiful... but so frightening.

A people do not throw their geniuses away. And if they are thrown away, it is our duty as artists and as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children and, if necessary, bone by bone.

Women have to summon up courage to fulfill dormant dreams.

Women have to be extremely careful about choosing something that they consider an act of defiance that can really be used to further their enslavement.

From infancy, I have relied on the fiercely sweet spirits of black men; and this is abundantly clear in my work.

Creation is a sustained period of bliss, even though the subject can still be very sad. Because there's the triumph of coming through and understanding that you have, and that you did it the way only you could do it. You didn't do it the way somebody told you to do it.

It's an awful feeling to write something that you feel is really important... and to feel that you're being published by people who really don't get it and or don't really care.

I can be almost terminally grief-stricken because things are so dire, but at the same time, there's a real lightheartedness about just the recoverability of life, of how things change, how they're not the same, ever again.

In my work and in myself I reflect black people, women and men, as I reflect others. One day even the most self-protective ones will look into the mirror I provide and not be afraid.

I just like to have words that describe things correctly. Now to me, 'black feminist' does not do that. I need a word that is organic, that really comes out of the culture, that really expresses the spirit that we see in black women. And it's just... womanish.

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.

I can imagine in years to come that my papers and memorabilia, my journals and letters, will find themselves always in the company of people who care about many of the things I do.

I'm the most stubborn person I know.

My mother was very strong. Once, she picked up a coconut and smashed it against my father's head. It taught me about women defending themselves and not collapsing in a heap.

I'm sure we, the American people, are the butt of jokes by those in power.

I'm for women choosing whatever they want to do but they have to really know what they are doing.

Sucking up to the biggies won't get us anywhere.

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

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.

We must, I believe, start teaching our children the sanity of nonviolence much earlier.

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.

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

I see children, all children, as humanity's most precious resource, because it will be to them that the care of the planet will always be left.

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.

I try to teach my heart not to want things it can't have.

Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me.

The most important question in the world is, 'Why is the child crying?'

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.

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

It no longer bothers me that I may be constantly searching for father figures; by this time, I have found several and dearly enjoyed knowing them all.

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

I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to.

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

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

Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.

Many readers fail to realize this, but 'The Color Purple' is a theological text. It is about the reclamation of one's original God: the earth and nature.

I understood at a very early age that in nature, I felt everything I should feel in church but never did. Walking in the woods, I felt in touch with the universe and with the spirit of the universe.

It is because I recognize the brutality with which my own multi-branched ancestors have been treated that I can identify the despicable, lawless, cruel, and sadistic behavior that has characterized Israel's attempts to erase a people, the Palestinians, from their own land.

You know how big love is? Love is big. love can hold anger; love can even hold hatred.

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.

Horses make a landscape look beautiful.

As you know from school, it's when you have not prepared for the test that you have the fear of failing. And if you have prepared, even if you fail, you've done your best.

For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle; and one faces down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged.

I think war is so incredibly backward, and I don't think it's intelligent, and it's not sane. So why would you want to support it?

We should not look down on our first ancestors.

Well, capitalism is a big problem, because with capitalism you're just going to keep buying and selling things until there's nothing else to buy and sell, which means gobbling up the planet.

Fiction is such a world of freedom, it's wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.

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

The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one's people that has not previously been taken into account.

If you want to have a life that is worth living, a life that expresses your deepest feelings and emotions and cares and dreams, you have to fight for it.

I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.

The fact is that when you do something from your heart, you leave a heart print.

What's really hard is that you could care a lot for someone and not want to live with him anymore.

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.

America is not nearly done. We're only in the beginning. Who knows who we will be? Who knows... what color we will be? It is all something that, maybe, our descendants -- if they survive that long -- will see.

My life is not to be somebody else's impact -- you know what I mean?

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

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

What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears.

Never be the only one, except, possibly, in your own home.

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's 'mature' critics often are.

Part of my ancestry is Cherokee. And in that tradition, you become an adult when you're 52.

You don't always have to be doing something. You can just be, and that's plenty.

Since the time of the witch burnings, the grandmothers and the healers and the midwives have been systematically targeted. And burned at the stake for hundreds of years, decimating whole communities.

I wanted in my lifetime to vote for a radical Native American woman, since my vision of any future that we might have is that it will be led by women and older women.

For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.

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

The quietly pacifist peaceful always die to make room for men who shout.

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.

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.

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

Life is abundant, and life is beautiful. And it's a good place that we're all in, you know, on this earth, if we take care of it.

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.

This is a wonderful planet, and it is being completely destroyed by people who have too much money and power and no empathy.