Quotes from Alice Walker

I started writing as a child. But I didn't think of myself actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something - no, maybe junior - and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.

I realized I was a country person - I'm just not used to small spaces.

Critics don't really affect the fact that we live in this paradise and what the meaning of that [is]. And what luck to have this!

I advocate that every woman be a part of a circle, and a circle that meets at least once a month, or if you can't do that, once every two months or every four months.

I think many people in my community had very different kinds of mothers: they had mothers who acquiesced in the system of male and white-supremacist domination, and my mother never did. She just could not do it. It just wasn't in her.

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's "mature" critics often are.

Our mothers and our grandmothers, some of them: moving to music not yet written.

Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.

Human beings may well be unable to break free of the dictatorship of greed that spreads like a miasma over the world, but no longer will we be an inarticulate and ignorant humanity, confused by our enslavement to superior cruelty and weaponry.

They be marching hand in hand, like going to war.

I think that indigenous women's wisdom is crucial. So much of the care of the Earth has come from the mothers. I think it's imperative we turn to their wisdom in how to take care of the planet.

One thing that never ceases to amaze me, along with the growth of vegetation from the earth and of hair from the head, is the growth of understanding.

You don't need organized religion to connect with the universe. Often a church is the only place you can go to find peace and quiet... But it shouldn't be confused with connecting with one's spirit.

Artists have a responsibility to speak and to act when governments fail, and if we don't do that, we really deserve the world we get.

One child must never be set above another, even in casual conversation, not to mention in speeches that circle the globe.

Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.

On a spiritual level, it's as though with my sighted eye I see what's before me, and with my unsighted eye I see what's hidden. It's illuminated life more than darkened it.

The long-term accommodation that protects marriage and other such relationships is ... forgetfulness.

The more I wonder, the more I love.

I'm tri-racial: African-American, Native American and Euro - that's the Scotch-Irish part.

Hard times require furious dancing.

I'm not convinced that women have the education or the sense of their own history enough or that they understand the cruelty of which men are capable and the delight that many men will take in seeing you choose to chain yourself - then they get to say 'See, you did it yourself.'

Creation is a sustained period of bliss, even though the subject can still be very sad. Because there's the triumph of coming through and understanding that you have, and that you did it the way only you could do it. You didn't do it the way somebody told you to do it.

Women have to summon courage to fulfill dormant dreams.