Alice Walker quotes:

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.

Howard Zinn was magical as a teacher. Witty, irreverent, and wise, he loved what he was teaching and clearly wanted his students to love it, also.

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.

In South Korea, they believe that when you turn 60, you've become a baby again and the rest of your life should be totally about joy and happiness, and people should leave you alone, and I just think that that's the height of intelligence.

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

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.

I made my first white women friends in college; they loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered.

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

When I joined the freedom movement in Mississippi in my early 20s, it was to come to the aid of sharecroppers, like my parents, who had been thrown off the land they'd always known - the plantations - because they attempted to exercise their 'democratic' right to vote.

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.

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.

It's so clear that you have to cherish everyone. I think that's what I get from these older black women, that every soul is to be cherished, that every flower Is to bloom.

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.

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

Human beings may well be unable to break free of the dictatorship of greed that spreads like a miasma over the world, but no longer will we be an inarticulate and ignorant humanity, confused by our enslavement to superior cruelty and weaponry.

Horses make a landscape look beautiful.

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.

I just feel that 'The Color Purple,' which was my 10th book, was a true gift from my ancestors.

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.

Politically, the world is so confused right now - there's so much suffering caused by various movements by various parties and people in power in government.

June Jordan, who died of cancer in 2002, was a brilliant, fierce, radical, and frequently furious poet. We were friends for thirty years. Not once in that time did she step back from what was transpiring politically and morally in the world. She spoke up, and led her students, whom she adored, to do the same.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I know black people love the idea that we finally have a beautiful, good-looking black president. But if he is doing awful things to us, we should wake up.

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.

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 gave my archive to Emory University because there's a really dear friend who teaches there, Rudolph Byrd, and he's the editor.

Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors.

If we want to fight people in the world, we should fight them with pillows - pillows stuffed with food, medicine, music... That would be so much cheaper than bombs.

I think the foundation of everything in my life is wonder.

I think that all people who feel that there is injustice in the world anywhere should learn as much of it as they can bear. That is our duty.

I just think cities are unnatural, basically. I know there are people who live happily in them, and I have cities that I love, too. But it's a disaster that we have moved so far from nature.

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

When I was 18, I went to the Soviet Union. I kept hearing that America was planning to bomb them - lots of bombs were going to come down on these people. I went there not knowing anything, except that I thought the whole thing was stupid and that I wanted to see who these people were that we were going to bomb.

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

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

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.

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.

People have so many hang-ups about how other people live their lives. People always want to keep you in a little box, or they need to label you and fix you in time and location.

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.

Most damage that others do us is out of fear, humiliation and pain. Those feelings occur in all of us, not just in those of us who profess a certain religious or racial devotion.

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

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

I'm not convinced that women have the education or the sense of their own history enough or that they understand the cruelty of which men are capable and the delight that many men will take in seeing you choose to chain yourself - then they get to say 'See, you did it yourself.'

Sexuality is one of the ways that we become enlightened, actually, because it leads us to self-knowledge.

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

You cannot see the changes that you're dreaming about, because they're internal.

Women have to summon up courage to fulfill dormant dreams.

Thank you' is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.

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

I have such respect for 'Democracy Now!'

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

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

I think that I do feel that my nature is to express what this self, this particular self at this time, experiences in the world. And that is so organic - I use this metaphor a lot but I'll use it again - it's like a pine tree producing pine cones, or a blackberry bush producing blackberries - it's just what happens with this being, now.

I'm very disappointed in Obama. I was very much in support of him in the beginning, but I cannot support war. I cannot support droning. I cannot support capitulating to the banks.

I used to meditate all the time in bed. That was when I was raising my daughter, and I'd get her up and off to school, and then I would go back to bed and meditate. And then I would do the same in the evening, and that was very good for that period because I had so many things to juggle as a single mother.

I advocate that every woman be a part of a circle, and a circle that meets at least once a month, or if you can't do that, once every two months or every four months.

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

It is crucial that young people are taught sustainable child production and rearing.

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

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

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

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.

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.

You bring children into the world. You love them with heart and soul.

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

There are those who believe Black people possess the secret of joy and that it is this that will sustain them through any spiritual or moral or physical devastation.

I prefer to praise people and the world rather than criticize them and it.

So many killings of black men in my lifetime. The physical shock is astounding.

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

Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?

I'm entirely interested in people, and also other creatures and beings, but especially in people, and I tend to read them by emotional field more than anything. So I have a special interest in what they're thinking and who they are and who's hiding behind those eyes and how did he get there, and what's the story, really?

I think there is a sense of being forced at this time to look at America's really large shadow and that's not all that bad.

Propaganda is amazing. People can be led to believe anything.

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

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 don't have this feeling that 70 is really old.

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

Language is an intrinsic part of who we are and what has, for good or evil, happened to us.

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

I have a collective sense of suffering.

I live a very secluded life, a very contemplative life and a very meditative one. That is my ideal life.

I realized I was a country person - I'm just not used to small spaces.

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.

Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.

We should not look down on our first ancestors.

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

My interest in creating anything is that it be useful.

People really had a problem with my disinterest in submission. They had a problem with my intellect, and they had a problem with my choice of lovers. They had a problem with my choice of everything.

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.

I was distressed that after 9/11, when the United States was attacked by terrorists, the United States' response was to attack Afghanistan, where some of the terrorists had been.

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

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

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

I live on the West Coast of the United States, and yet the air that I breathe is sometimes the same air that was being breathed in China the day before.

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.

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

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

They be marching hand in hand, like going to war.

World wars have been fought and lost; for every war is against the world and every war against the world is lost.

Peace: the fruit of justice done especially to the Self.

He say, Celie, tell me the truth. You don't like me cause I'm a man?I blow my nose. take off they pants, I say, and men look like frogs to me. No matter how you kiss 'em, as far as I'm concern, frogs is what they stay.

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

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

She thinks her sister has held life always in the palm of one hand, that "no" is a word the world never learned to say to her."

The long-term accommodation that protects marriage and other such relationships is ... forgetfulness.

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

we are the ones we have been waiting for

Love is big; love can hold anger, love can even hold hatred. It's about the intention of what you want it to do.

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.

Thank you' is the best prayer that anyone could say.

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.

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.