Quotes from Alice Walker

It's a tragedy, in a way, that Americans are brought up to think that they cannot feel for other people and other beings just because they are different. They think they're different. It's very limiting.

I used to meditate all the time in bed. That was when I was raising my daughter, and I'd get her up and off to school, and then I would go back to bed and meditate. And then I would do the same in the evening, and that was very good for that period because I had so many things to juggle as a single mother.

At one point I learned transcendental meditation. This was 30-something years ago. It took me back to the way that I naturally was as a child growing up way in the country, rarely seeing people. I was in that state of oneness with creation and it was as if I didn't exist except as a part of everything.

Part of our tradition as black women is that we are universalists. Black children, yellow children, red children, brown children, that is the black woman's normal, day-to-day relationship. In my family alone, we are about four different colors.

It is because I recognize the brutality with which my own multi-branched ancestors have been treated that I can identify the despicable, lawless, cruel, and sadistic behavior that has characterized Israel's attempts to erase a people, the Palestinians, from their own land.

I see myself in all the people in the world who are suffering and who are very badly treated and who are often made to feel that they have no place on this Earth.

I think that I do feel that my nature is to express what this self, this particular self at this time, experiences in the world. And that is so organic - I use this metaphor a lot but I'll use it again - it's like a pine tree producing pine cones, or a blackberry bush producing blackberries - it's just what happens with this being, now.

Fiction is such a world of freedom, it's wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.

I try to teach my heart not to want things it cant have.

You know how big love is? Love is big. love can hold anger love can even hold hatred.

The infinite faith I have in people's ability to understand anything that makes sense has always been justified, finally, by their behavior.

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.

It is crucial that young people are taught sustainable child production and rearing.

Don't wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you've got to make yourself.

One of the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement is that when you travel through the South today, you do not feel overwhelmed by a residue of grievance and hate.

The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn't want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass.

Love is big; love can hold anger, love can even hold hatred. It's about the intention of what you want it to do.

It is natural to want to have a future.

You don't always have to be doing something. You can just be, and that's plenty.

In South Korea, they believe that when you turn 60, you've become a baby again and the rest of your life should be totally about joy and happiness, and people should leave you alone, and I just think that that's the height of intelligence.

War will stop when we no longer praise it, or give it any attention at all. Peace will come wherever it is sincerely invited.

I think the War on Terror is really absurd, especially coming from a country that is founded on terrorism.

Men make war to get attention. All killing is an expression of self-hate.

To me war is something to be outgrown, recognized as immature, wasteful, and so destructive to life that human beings should shun it ... as they once shunned bubonic plague.