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Alice Walker Quotes

Alice Malsenior Walker is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, and activist. She wrote the critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple for which she won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She also wrote the novels Meridian and The Third Life of Grange Copeland , among other works.

✵ 9. February 1944  •  Other names ಆಲಿಸ್ ವಾಕರ್, آلیس واکر, ਅਲਾਇਸ ਵਾਕਰ
Alice Walker photo

Works

The Color Purple
The Color Purple
Alice Walker
The Temple of My Familiar
Alice Walker: 91 quotes24 likes

Famous Alice Walker Quotes

“Horses make a landscape look beautiful.”

Alice Walker

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

Alice Walker

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

Alice Walker book The Color Purple

Source: The Color Purple (1982)

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.”

Alice Walker book The Color Purple

Source: The Color Purple

Alice Walker Quotes about people

“People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.”

Alice Walker book The Color Purple

Source: The Color Purple

“I'm mad about the waste that happens when people who love each other can't even bring themselves to talk.”

Alice Walker book The Temple of My Familiar

Source: The Temple of My Familiar

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

Alice Walker

As quoted in The Best Liberal Quotes Ever : Why the Left is Right (2004) by William P. Martin, p. 173.

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

Alice Walker

“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.”

Alice Walker

“Some colored people so scared of whitefolks they claim to love the cotton gin.”

Alice Walker book The Color Purple

Source: The Color Purple

Alice Walker Quotes about love

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

Alice Walker book The Color Purple

Source: The Color Purple (1982)

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

Alice Walker

“Surely the earth can be saved
by all the people
who insist
on love.”

Alice Walker

Source: Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful: Poems

“Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance and holler, just trying to be loved.”

Alice Walker book The Color Purple

Source: The Color Purple

“And I thank God let me gain understanding enough to know love can't be halted just cause some peoples moan and groan. P.238”

Alice Walker book The Color Purple

Source: The Color Purple

“The only way to solace anyone who loved you in life is to be a good memory”

Alice Walker

Source: By The Light Of My Father's Smile

Alice Walker: Trending quotes

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

Alice Walker

“Activism is the rent I pay for living on the planet.”

Alice Walker

From the film poster for Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth.

“We know a roofleaf is not Jesus Christ, but in its own humble way, is it not God?”

Alice Walker book The Color Purple

The Color Purple (1982)

Alice Walker Quotes

“Be nobody's darling;
Be an outcast.
Take the contradictions
Of your life
And wrap around
You like a shawl,
To parry stones
To keep you warm.”

Alice Walker

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

Alice Walker

“Hard times require furious dancing. Each of us is proof.”

Alice Walker

Source: Hard Times Require Furious Dancing: New Poems

“The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women for men.”

Alice Walker

Foreword to The Dreaded Comparison: Animal Slavery and Human Slavery (1996) by Marjorie Spiegel, p. 14 http://books.google.com/books?ei=je4zTPjrBcmTnQfXmMCLBA&ct=result&id=8u_tAAAAMAAJ&dq=dreaded+comparison+%22exist+for+their+own%22&q=%22exist+for+their+own%22.

“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.”

Alice Walker

“… have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.”

Alice Walker book The Color Purple

Source: The Color Purple

“Time moves slowly, but passes quickly.”

Alice Walker book The Color Purple

Source: The Color Purple

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

Alice Walker

“The nature of this flower is to bloom.”

Alice Walker

“A grown child is a dangerous thing.”

Alice Walker book The Color Purple

Source: The Color Purple

“Everything want to be loved.”

Alice Walker book The Color Purple

Source: The Color Purple

“we are the ones we have been waiting for”

Alice Walker

“Oh, Celie, unbelief is a terrible thing. And so is the hurt we cause others unknowingly.”

Alice Walker book The Color Purple

Source: The Color Purple

“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.”

Alice Walker book The Temple of My Familiar

Source: The Temple of My Familiar

“When life descends into the pit
I must become my own candle
Willingly burning my self
To light up the darkness around me.”

Alice Walker

“Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.”

Alice Walker book In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

Source: In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

“Never offer your heart
to someone who eats hearts
who finds heartmeat
delicious
but not rare
who sucks the juices
drop by drop
and bloody-chinned
grins
like a God.”

Alice Walker

“She was so quiet. So reflective. And she could erase herself, her spirit, with a swiftness that truly startled, when she knew the people around her could not respect it.”

Alice Walker

“The more I wonder, the more I love.”

Alice Walker book The Color Purple

Source: The Color Purple

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

Alice Walker

Source: Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology

“I'm pore, I'm black, I may be ugly and can't cook, a voice say to everything listening. But I'm here.”

Alice Walker book The Color Purple

Source: The Color Purple

“Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors.”

Alice Walker book The Color Purple

Source: The Color Purple

“(a womanist)

3. Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself. Regardless.”

Alice Walker book In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

Source: In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

“She thought of how precious it was to be able to know another person over many years. There was incomparable richness in it.”

Alice Walker

“What you hope for, you also fear.”

Alice Walker book The Temple of My Familiar

Source: The Temple of My Familiar

“Every time I conjure up a rock, I throw it.”

Alice Walker book The Color Purple

Source: The Color Purple

“Who am I to tell her who to love? My job just to love her good and true myself. P. 237”

Alice Walker book The Color Purple

Source: The Color Purple

“I don't know. I imagine good teaching as a circle of earnest people sitting down to ask each other meaningful questions. I don't see it as a handing down of answers…”

Alice Walker

“Like I said… fine with me.”

Alice Walker book The Color Purple

Source: The Color Purple

“The world is changing, I said. It is no longer a world just for boys and men.”

Alice Walker book The Color Purple

The Color Purple (1982)

“I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you've found It.”

Alice Walker book The Color Purple

Source: The Color Purple

“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.”

Alice Walker book The Temple of My Familiar

Source: The Temple of My Familiar

“Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise”

Alice Walker

“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.”

Alice Walker

“We do not believe in heaven or hell…; we do not believe in eternal damnation. We believe only in the unavoidable horror of hurting others and of likewise being hurt.”

Alice Walker

Source: By The Light Of My Father's Smile

“His little whistle sound like it lost way down a jar, and the jar in the bottom of the creek. P. 64”

Alice Walker book The Color Purple

Source: The Color Purple

“Resist the temptation to think what afflicts you is peculiar to you. Have faith that what is in your consciousness can be communicated to the consciousness of all. And is, in many cases, already there.”

Alice Walker book The Temple of My Familiar

Source: The Temple of My Familiar

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

Alice Walker book In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

Source: In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

“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…”

Alice Walker

“Resistance is the secret of joy!”

Alice Walker

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

Alice Walker book In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

Source: In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

“The Nature of This Flower Is to Bloom

Rebellious. Living.
Against the Elemental Crush.
A Song of Color
Blooming
For Deserving Eyes.
Blooming Gloriously
For its Self.”

Alice Walker

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