Quotes from Alice Walker

Being alive begin to seem like a awful strain.

The God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know.

However, loving is nothing if it is not an education...

I lie back on the bed and haul up my dress. Yank down my bloomers. Stick the looking glass tween my legs. Ugh. All that hair. Then my pussy lips be black. Then inside look like a wet rose. It a lot prettier than you thought, ain't it? she say from the door.

E nós ajoelhamos lá mesmo no convés e agradecemos a Deus por nos ter deixado ver a terra pela qual nossas mães e pais choraram — e viveram e morreram — para ver outra vez.

All my life I never care what people thought bout nothing I did,' I say. 'But deep down in my heart I care about God. What he going to think. And come to find out, he don't think. Just sit up there glorying in being deef, I reckon. 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.

For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle, and one faces down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged.

Anyhow, he say, you know how it is. You ast yourself one question, it lead to fifteen. I start to wonder why us need love. Why us suffer. Why us black. Why us men and women. Where do children really come from. 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.

One crying child is the rotten apple in the barrel of the tribe!

God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don't know what you looking for.

Qué crees tú? Yo creo que estamos aquí para cavilar. Para preguntar. Y que, preguntándonos por las cosas grandes, encontramos respuesta para las pequeñas, casi por casualidad. Pero sobre las grandes te quedas como al principio. Y cuánto más cavilo y me preguntó, más amor siento.

I began to feel humiliated. It felt like I was abusing myself. Hiding something important that was not really at fault.

That feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all.

The Olinka do not believe girls should be educated. When I asked a mother why she thought this, she said: A girl is nothing to herself; only to her husband can she become something.

Sometimes I feel mad at her. Feel like I could scratch her hair right off her head. But then I think, Shug got a right to live too. She got a right to look over the world in whatever company she choose. Just cause I love her don't take none of her rights.

But when I hear them together all I can do is pull the quilt over my head and finger my little button and titties and cry.

Hope to sin only in the service of waking up.

So he bought her a car, only he refuse to show her how to drive it.

I already had my bad luck,' she say. 'I had enough to keep me laughing the rest of my life.

There is a way forward and yes it is with a broken heart but it is our own way collectively convened, pondered, shared.

Then, just when I know I can live content without Shug, just when Mr. _ done ast me to marry him again, this time in the spirit as well as in the flesh, and just after I say Naw, I still don't like frogs, but let's be friends, Shug write me she coming home. 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.

People fussing and fighting and pointing fingers at other people, and never even looking for no peace.

In our despair that justice is slow we sit with heads bowed wondering how even whether we will ever be healed. Perhaps it is a question only the ravaged the violated seriously ask. And is that not now almost all of us? But hope is on the way. As usual Hope is a woman herding her children around her all she retains of who she was; as usual except for her kids she has lost almost everything. Hope is a woman who has lost her fear.

She say, Celie, tell the truth, 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.