Quotes by Alice Walker

Dear Nettie, I dont write to God no more, I write to you.

What will people say, you running off to Memphis like you dont have a house to look after?Shug say, Albert. Try to think like you got some sense. Why any woman give a shit what people think is a mystery to me.Well, say Grady, trying to bring light. A woman cant git a man if peoples talk.Shug look at me and us giggle. Then us laugh sure nuff. Then Squeak start to laugh. Then Sofia. All us laugh and

All her young life she has tried to please her father, never quite realizing that, as a girl, she never could.

Sofia the kind of woman no matter what she have in her hand she make it look like a weapon.

He say, Celie, tell me the truth. You dont like me cause Im 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 Im concern, frogs is what they stay.

A girl is nothing to herself; only to her husband can she become something. What can she become? I asked. Why, she said, the mother of his children. But I am not the mother of anybodys children, I said, and I am something.

Long as I can spell G-o-d I got somebody along.

And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see - or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.

Why should the killers of the world be the future and not us?

What that song? I ast. Sound low down dirty to me. Like what the preacher tells you its sin to hear. Not to mention sing.She hum a little more. Something come to me, she say. Something I made up. Something you help scratch out my head.

The savage rushing of the river seemed to be inside her head, inside her body. Even when the oarswomen, their guides, were speaking to her, she had the impression she couldnt quite hear them because of the roar. Not of the river that did indeed roar, just behind them, close to the simple shelter theyd made for her, but because of an internal roar as of the sound of a massive accumulation of words, spoken all at once, but collected over a lifetime, now trying to leave her body. As they rose to her lips, and in response to the question: Do you want to go home? she leaned over a patch of yellow grass near her elbow and threw up. All the words from decades of her life filled her throat. Words she had said or had imagined saying or had swallowed before saying to her father, dead these many years. All the words to her mother. To her husbands. Children. Lovers. The words shouted back at the television set, spreading its virus of mental confusion. Once begun, the retching went on and on. She would stop, gasping for breath, rest a minute, and be off again. Draining her body of precious fluid... Soon, exhausted, she was done. No, she had said weakly, I dont want to go home. Ill be all right now.

When it is all too much; when the news is so bad meditation itself feels useless, and a single life feels too small a stone to offer on the altar of Peace, find a Human Sunrise. Find those people who are committed to changing our scary reality. Human sunrises are happening all over the earth, at every moment. People gathering, people working to change the intolerable, people coming in their robes and sandals or in their rags and bare feet, and they are singing, or not, and they are chanting, or not. But they are working to bring peace, light, compassion, to the infinitely frightening downhill slide of Human life.

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

But what was good tween us must have been nothing but bodies, she say. Cause I dont know the Albert that dont dance, cant hardly laugh, never talk bout nothing, beat you and hid your sister Netties letters. Who he?

Even as I hold youI think of you as someone gonefar, far away. Your eyes the colorof pennies in a bowl of dark honeybringing sweet light to someone elseyour black hair slipping through my fingersis the flash of your head goingaround a corneryour smile, breaking before me,the flippant last turnof a revolving door,emptying you out, changed,away from me.Even as I hold youI am letting go.

Even as I hold you, I am letting you go.

Anyhow, I say, the God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgitful, and lowdown.

There is a way that the men speak to women that reminds me too much of Pa. They listen just long enough to issue instructions. They don’t even look at women when women are speaking. They look at the ground and bend their heads toward the ground.

The three wealthiest people in the world own more than the GDP of forty-eight countries!

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