Quotes from Alice Walker

You think you can avoid [pain,] but you actually can't. If you do, you just get sicker, or you feel more pain. But if you can speak it, if you can write it, if you can paint it, it is very healing.

You seem so clear about who you are. So certain that you are just right as you are, that for all your intelligence and maybe in spite of it, you never seem to need a second opinion.

Hope is a woman who has lost her fear.

And when they spy on us let them discover us loving

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 anybody's children, I said, and I am something.

the God of woman is autonomy

there is no resistance to the idea that what is foreign can be known. Can be understood. Can be held in the embrace of love that holds the Universe. Given this Earth on which we live and grow, given its beauty and generosity, its majesty and comfort, how can one doubt that one is loved? That in fact there is an abundance, not a scarcity of love? It is all anyone ever wants, really, I believe, and it is all around us as we starve.

If she come, I be happy. If she don't, I be content. And then I figure this the lesson I was suppose tolearn.

He recognized her immediately when he saw her again. And what he recognized was her energy, which seemed to precede her. As if her spirit were thrusting itself forward, into the unknown; dazzled, charmed, challenged, hopeful, happy to be energized by the mysterious, loving the adrenaline rush of surprise.

She sicker than my mama was when she die. But she more evil than my mama and that keep her alive.

You must run around like a crazy person or walk sedately honoring the dead.

Hard times' is a phrase the English love to use, when speaking of Africa. And it is easy to forget that Africa's 'hard times' were made harder by them.

Do you know what O'Keefe Says about blue? he asked her, blowing out a cloud of smoke, warming to her voice, though he did not remember her face clearly from the opening night's exhibition. What? That it is the color that will remain after everything is destroyed.

First time I got the full sight of Shug Avery long black body with it black plum nipples, look like her mouth, I thought I had turned into a man

All womens not alike, Tobias, she say. Believe it or not. Oh, I believe it, he say. Just can't prove it to the world.

It always making little surprises and springing them on us when us least expect.

What is a promise if not your hand in mine?

We do it because we care. We care that Vincent Van Gogh mutilated his ear. We care that behind a pile of manure in the yard he destroyed his life. We care that Scott Joplin's music lives! We care because we know this: the life we save is our own.

I have the uncanny feeling that, just at the end of my life, I am beginning to reinhabit completely the body I long ago left.

The Lord don't like ugly, she say. And he ain't stuck on pretty.

It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That's how I come to know trees fear man.

I had assumed that the Earth, the spirit of the Earth, noticed exceptions -- those who wantonly damage it and those who do not. But the Earth is wise. It has given itself into the keeping of all, and all are therefore accountable.

subservience of any kind is death to the spirit.

When I offered the word Womanism many years ago, it was to give us a tool to use, as feminist women of color, in times like these. These are the moments we can see clearly, and must honor devotedly, our singular path as women of color in the United States. We are not white women and this truth has been ground into us for centuries, often in brutal ways.