Quotes from Alice Walker

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.

We were the kind of friends, instead, who understood that we were forever on the same side: the side of the poor, the economically, spiritually and politically oppressed, "the wretched of the earth.

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. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.

No one is exempt from the possibility of a conscious connection to All That Is.

the only way to stop making somebody the serpent is for everybody to accept everybody else as a child of God

Can't you see I'm already half dead.

Shug say, Wellsah, and I thought it was only whitefolks do freakish things like that.

He never ast me nothing bout myself. He clam on top of me and fuck and fuck, even when my head bandaged. Nobody ever love me, I say.

We've never seen weather like the weather there is today. We've never seen violence like the violence we see today. We've never seen greed or evil like the greed and evil we see today. We've never seen tomatoes either, like the ones being created today. There is much from which to recoil.

Mamma Nettie, he said, sitting on the bed next to me, how do you know when you really love someone? Sometimes you don't know, I said.

They were assumed, like women and cats, to have no souls.

Você sabe, todo mundo é capaz de aprender um pouco, cedo ou tarde. Tudo o que é preciso fazer é viver.

she say her head feel like its full of little white men with hammers.

When his uncle and his guests finished laughing, they'd seemed lighter, clearer; even their activities appeared to be done more gracefully. It was as if the laughing emptied them, and sharing it placed whatever was laughable and unbearable in its proper perspective.

Jack is tall and kind and don't hardly say anything. Love children. Respect his wife, Odessa, and all Odessa amazon sisters. Anything she want to take on, he right there. Never talking much, though. That's the main thing. And then I remember one time he touch me. And it felt like his fingers had eyes. Felt like he knew me all over, but he just touch my arm up near the shoulder.

On entering a place where animals are bred, my first thoughts are always about enslavement. Force. Captivity.

Longe dos olhos, longe do pensamento.

Her senior thesis was based on the notion that no one should be allowed to own more land than could be worked in a day, by hand.

An American, I said, sighing, but understanding my love of my adopted country perhaps for the first time: an American looks like a wounded person whose wound is hidden from others, and sometimes from herself. An American looks like me.

But all things look brighter because I have a loving soul to share them with.

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 moreI love. (pg. 283)

They were given Christian names that went with their new summarily acquired (with the help of the lash and the threat of annihilation) religion, and then, having been branded on face or body, they were prodded onto the ships, packed, as the cliché goes, like sardines in a can.

Life was giving birth to children—who could have no memory of anything other than brutal enslavement—then dying and being tossed into a ravine or buried at the edge of a swamp or field.

Sve 'o?e da bude voljeno. Mi pevamo i igramo, nameštamo lice i dajemo bukete cve?a, trude?i se da budemo voljeni. Jesi l' nekad primjetila da drve?e radi sve mogu?e da privu?e pažnju, sam' što ne hoda?