Quotes by Alice Walker

Time moves slowly, but passes quickly.

Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what 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.

The life of my people is to remember forever; each head granary is full. The life of your people is to forget: your thing granaries (museums), and not yourselves, are full.

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

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

The mountain of despair has dwindled, and the stone of hope has size and shape, and can be fondled by the eyes and by the hand. But freedom has always been an elusive tease, and in the very act of grabbing for it one can become shackled.

If this were a courageous country,it would ask Gloria to lead itsince she is sane and funny and beautiful and smartand the National Leaders weve always hadare not.When I listen to her talk about womens rightschildrens rightsmens rightsI think of the long line of Americans who should have been president, but werent.Imagine Crazy Horse as president. Sojourner Truth.John Brown. Harriet Tubman. Black Elk or Geronimo.Imagine President Martin Luther King confrontingthe youthful Oppie Oppenheimer. Imagine PresidentMalcolm X going after the Klan. Imagine President StevieWonder dealing with the Truly Needy.Imagine President Shirley Chisholm, Ron Dellums, orSweet Honey in the Rockdealing with Anything.It is imagining to make us weep with frustration,as we languish under real estate dealers, killers, and bad actors.

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.

On Stripping Bark from Myself(for Jane, who said trees die from it)Because women are expected to keep silent abouttheir close escapes I will not keep silentand if I am destroyed (naked tree!) someone willpleasemark the spotwhere I fall and know I could not livesilent in my own lieshearing their how nice she is!whose adoration of the retouched imageI so despise.No. I am finished with livingfor what my mother believesfor what my brother and father defendfor what my lover elevatesfor what my sister, blushing, denies or rushesto embrace.I find my ownsmall persona standing selfagainst the worldan equality of willsI finally understand.Besides:My struggle was always againstan inner darkness: I carry within myselfthe only known keysto my death – to unlock life, or close it shutforever. A woman who loves wood grains, the coloryellowand the sun, I am happy to fightall outside murderersas I see I must.

Horses make a landscape look beautiful.

What is always needed in the appreciation of art, or life, is the larger perspective. Connections made, or at least attempted, where none existed before, the straining to encompass in ones glance at the varied world the common thread, the unifying theme through immense diversity, a fearlessness of growth, of search, of looking, that enlarges the private and the public world. And yet, in our particular society, it is the narrowed and narrowing view of life that often wins

The absence of models, in literature as in life, to say nothing of painting, is an occupational hazard for the artist, simply because models in art, in behavior, in growth of spirit and intellect--even if rejected--enrich and enlarge ones view of existence. Deadlier still, to the artist who lacks models, is the curse of ridicule, the bringing to bear on an artists best work, especially his or her most original, most strikingly deviant, only a fund of ignorance and the presumption that as an artists critic ones judgement is free of the restrictions imposed by prejudice, and is well informed, indeed, about all the art in the world that really matters.

For several years, while I searched for, found, and studied black women writers, I deliberately shut OConnor out, feeling almost ashamed that she had reached me first. And yet, even when I no longer read her, I missed her, and realized that though the rest of America might not mind, having endured it so long, I would never be satisfied with a segregated literature. I would have to read Zora Hurston and Flannery OConnor, Nella Larsen and Carson McCullers, Jean Toomer and William Faulkner, before I could begin to feel well read at all.

Now. Is this life or not?I be so calm.If she come, I be happy. If she don’t, I be content.And then I figure this the lesson I was suppose to learn.

And I try to teach my heart not to want nothing it cant have.

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

The more powerful the powerful appear the more invisible they become, said Armando. This used to work differently than now. In the old days it was said that the powerful merged with the divine and the divine was all that one saw. But now the powerful have merged with the shadow, really with death, and when you encounter them they are really hard to see.

I dont know who tried to teach him what to do in the bedroom, but it must have been a furniture salesman.

Shug say, What, too shamefaced to put singing and dancing and fucking together? She laugh. That’s the reason they call what us sing the devil’s music. Devils love to fuck.

Naw, I say. Mr ____, can tell you, I dont like it at all. What is it to like? He git up on you, heist your nightgown round your waist, plunge in. Most times I pretend I aint there. He never know the difference. Never ast me how I feel, nothing. Just do his business, get off, go to sleep.She start to laugh. Do his business, she say. Do his business. Why, Miss Celie. You make it sound like he going to the toilet on you.Thats what it feel like, I say.She stop laughing.