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Alice Walker Quotes
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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
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Alice Walker: 91 quotes25 likes

Alice Walker Quotes

“It didn't take long to realize I didn't hardly know nothing. And that if you ast yourself why you black or a man or a woman or a bush it don't mean nothing if you don't ast why you here, period”

Alice Walker book The Color Purple

Source: The Color Purple

“But it ain't easy, trying to do without God even if you know he ain't there, trying to do without him is a strain”

Alice Walker book The Color Purple

Source: The Color Purple

“womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender”

Alice Walker

“The animals of the planet are in desperate peril… Without free animal life I believe we will lose the spiritual equivalent of oxygen.”

Alice Walker

“Well, sometime Mr —— git on me pretty hard. I have to talk to Old Maker. But he my husband. I shrug my shoulders. This life soon be over, I say. Heaven last all ways.

You ought to bash Mr —— head open, she say. Think bout heaven later.”

Alice Walker book The Color Purple

Source: The Color Purple

“I love his dear eyes in which the vulnerability and beauty of his soul can be plainly read.”

Alice Walker book The Color Purple

Source: The Color Purple

“I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ast. And that in wondering bout the big things and asting bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, he say, the more I love.”

Alice Walker book The Color Purple

The Color Purple (1982)

“You're all I want! You're all I have! GO AWAY!.”

Alice Walker book The Color Purple

The Color Purple (1982)

“He has told me he likes men as well as he likes women, which seems only natural, he says, since he is the offspring of two sexes as well as two races. No one is surprised he is biracial; why should they be surprised he is bisexual? This is an explanation I have never heard and cannot entirely grasp; it seems too logical for my brain.”

Alice Walker book Possessing the Secret of Joy

Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992).

“The harm that you do to others is the harm that you do to yourself and you cannot think then that you can cause wars in other parts of the world and destroy people and drone them without this having a terrible impact on your own soul and your own consciousness.”

Alice Walker

Poet, Author Alice Walker Meets the Inner Journey with Global Activism in "The Cushion in the Road" http://www.democracynow.org/2013/5/28/poet_author_alice_walker_meets_the (May 28, 2013).

“I don’t know nothing, I think. And glad of it.”

Alice Walker book The Color Purple

The Color Purple (1982)

“I felt in Georgia and on the east coast generally very squeezed. 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. I feel a greater fluidity here. People are much more willing to accept that nothing is permanent, everything is changeable so there is freedom and I do need to live where I can be free.”

Alice Walker

On living in California, as quoted in "A long walk to freedom" in The Guardian (25 February 2001) http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/feb/25/fiction.features1.

“They calls me yellow like yellow be my name. They calls me yellow like yellow be my name. But if yellow is a name Why aint black the same. Well, if I say Hey black girl Lord, she try to ruin my game.”

Alice Walker book The Color Purple

The Color Purple (1982)

“I want a grown-up attitude to Cuba, for instance, a country and people I love. I want an end to the war immediately, and I want the soldiers to be encouraged to destroy their weapons and drive themselves out of Iraq. I want the Israeli government to be made accountable for its behaviour to the Palestinians, and I want the people of the US to cease acting as if they don't understand what is going on. But most of all I want someone with the confidence to talk to anyone, "enemy" or "friend", and this Obama has shown he can do.”

Alice Walker

"Obama is the change that America has tried to hide" in The Guardian (1 April 2008) http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/apr/01/barackobama.uselections2008

“But please remember, especially in these times of group-think and the right-on chorus, that 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.”

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

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983)

“I think Africans are very much like white people back home, in that they think they are the center of the universe and that everything that is done is done for them.”

Alice Walker book The Color Purple

The Color Purple (1982)

“I think unless the people are given information about what is happening to them, they will die in ignorance. And i think that's the big sin. I mean if there is such a thing as a sin, that's it, to destroy people and not have them have a clue about how this is happening.”

Alice Walker

Poet, Author Alice Walker Meets the Inner Journey with Global Activism in "The Cushion in the Road" http://www.democracynow.org/2013/5/28/poet_author_alice_walker_meets_the (May 28, 2013).