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.

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

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

I feel I am a child that's lost its mother. I feel like a calf whose mother has gone off to slaughter.

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.

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

Books became my world because the world I was in was very hard.