Quotes from Alice Walker

I never have an intended audience. I just write, you know.

Some people are painters, and some are ballet dancers, and I'm a writer.

At Sarah Lawrence, I realized that everybody was already what they were going to be. The painters were painting, the writers writing, the dancers dancing. And nobody wore any makeup. The art was uppermost.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

I've always felt quite singular, even as a child. That I must stay on track to keep my purpose.

If I could live as a tree, as a river, as the moon, as the sun, as a star, as the earth, as a rock, I would. ...Writing permits me to experience life as any number of strange creations.

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.

I just really love people a lot. I really love them.

HELPED are those who love the entire cosmos rather than their own tiny country, city, or farm, for to them will be shown the unbroken web of life and the meaning of infinity.

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

Listen, God loves everything you love, and a mess of stuff you don't.

Freedom, after all, is like love: the more you give to others, the more you have.

This could be our revolution: to love what is plentiful as much as what's scarce.

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

Love likes to extend itself. If you receive it in a book - or however you get it - then your duty is to extend it beyond.

You can love yourself spiritually, physically-in almost any way that anybody else can.

How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.

I think that all people who feel that there is injustice in the world anywhere should learn as much of it as they can bear. That is our duty.

I think war is so incredibly backward, and I don't think it's intelligent, and it's not sane. So why would you want to support it?

You cannot see the changes that you're dreaming about, because they're internal.

Part of what confuses people in times of upheaval is that you're getting so many different points of view and directions and so and so, how to do this and do that. And a lot of it is written in a language that honestly most people cannot understand.

My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.

Even with all of the things that are so awful, if you walk into your yard and stay there looking at almost anything for five minutes, you will be stunned by how marvelous life is and how incredibly lucky we are to have it.

Part of my ancestry is Cherokee. And in that tradition, you become an adult when you're 52.