Alice Walker Quotes

Just be what it is that you are, and that is just fine. You don't have to be what you're not in any way. Live that and live that fully, and that is where you discover ecstasy. You can't really have ecstasy as something other than yourself

There's an ecstatic side to writing. It's like jazz. It just has a life.

One white man on the platform in South Carolina asked us where we were going--we had got off the train to get some fresh air and to dust the grit and dust out of our clothes. When we said Africa he looked offended and tickled too. Niggers going to Africa, he said to his wife. Now I have seen everything.

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.

Helped are those who are content to be themselves; they will never lack mystery in their lives and the joys of self-discovery will be constant.

It is justice and respect that I want the world to dust off and put - without delay, and with tenderness - back on the head of the Palestinian child. It will be imperfect justice and respect because the injustice and disrespect have been so severe. But I believe we are right to try.

The Congo is really beautiful. People correct me and say, "Oh, you mean the Democratic Republic of the Congo." Well, fine. But, the land there, the landscape is extraordinary. It's big lakes and beautiful hills and trees.

My parents taught me service - not by saying, but by doing. That was my culture, the culture of my family.

It's essential that we understand that taking care of the planet will be done as we take care of ourselves. You know that you can't really make much of a difference in things until you change yourself.

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.

You don't really stay attached to things. Life goes on, so you don't really sit around and think about how they are relevant to other people. You hope that whatever you create will be [relevant].

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

Wish for nothing larger Than your own small heart.

I have never felt that the one thing that I am 'known for' is what I am.

In the far upper corner of my altar is a photo of Joan Crawford in her most fierce Mommy Dearest mode, just to remind me of some of the cost of everyone's hard-earned sweetness and light.

Stretching [and] yoga [are] very helpful. All of these things - they really do help. Good food and a lot of sleep. And reading - reading good books. Sometimes movies - although a lot of the movies are difficult.

before I embark on any new venture, I ask myself: will the joy of doing this make me lose track of any concern for time? If the answer is yes, I proceed!

So the best thing is to really work on yourself and opening your own heart and just letting all that stuff [worrying] go. And it is possible. It's sometimes takes a lot of time; it's not easy. And a lot of sitting with yourself and trying to work with your own heart.

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.

Time moves slowly, but passes quickly.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.

People will say to you, "Oh, you are fearless." That is so not true. We should stop saying that about people. It's a slander, really.

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.

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

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

I loved meditation. I love it because that's where you find what your voice is. You cannot really find it easily in this culture. This culture is the noisiest culture ever, ever. I think the damage that it has done to people is in that realm of silencing them. They are overwhelmed by gadgets. They don't know what to think because they're so heavily programmed about what it is that they should want and should think.

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

You must run around like a crazy person or walk sedately honoring the dead.

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.

human animals and nonhuman animals can communicate quite well; if we are brought up around animals as children we take this for granted. By the time we are adults we no longer remember.

I don't focus on criticism. I prefer to praise people and the world, rather than criticize them and it.

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

The original crime of niggers and lesbians is that they prefer themselves.

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.

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

The sight of a Black nun strikes their sentimentality; and, as I am unalterably rooted in native ground, they consider me a work of primitive art, housed in a magical color; the incarnation of civilized, anti-heathenism, and the fruit of a triumphing idea.

When people become elders - when they're older; they can be old without being an elder, really. They [can] just be old and not very useful.

I've found, in my own writing, that a little hatred, keenly directed, is a useful thing.

Artists are messengers whose responsibility is to unite the world -- a faith that will lead not to destruction but to transformation.

To know is to exist; to exist is to be involved, to move about, to see the world with my own eyes.

What hurts the most is being misunderstood. They tell me that's an Aquarian trait - that that's the thing we don't like.

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

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.

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.

When the ax came into the forest the trees said the handle is one of us.

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

Our mothers and grandmothers ... moving to music not yet written.

Anything that forces you to act at the possible harm of your own existence is going to exact a cost. You have to then think about, "Can I pay this? What will this mean to me - to my relationships, to my family, to everybody? What is this going to take? How much of me is this going to take?"