Quotes from Alice Walker

Ignorance, arrogance, and racism have bloomed as Superior Knowledge in all too many universities.

Sexuality is one of the ways that we become enlightened, actually, because it leads us to self-knowledge.

I don't know nothing, I think. And glad of it.

Many people are aware that we are in peril and that there is no trustworthy leadership.

I know, in my soul, that to eat a creature who is raised to be eaten, and who never has a chance to be a real being, is unhealthy. It's like...you're just eating misery. You're eating a bitter life.

we are the ones we have been waiting for

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they're still beautiful.

In the summer of 1966, I went to Mississippi to be in the heart of the civil-rights movement, helping people who had been thrown off the farms or taken off the welfare roles for registering to vote. While working there, I met the civil-rights lawyer I later married - we became an interracial couple.

I live on the West Coast of the United States, and yet the air that I breathe is sometimes the same air that was being breathed in China the day before.

I don't feel I've had a decent critic ever on the East coast.

Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors.

I gave my archive to Emory University because there's a really dear friend who teaches there, Rudolph Byrd, and he's the editor.

We must, I believe, start teaching our children the sanity of nonviolence much earlier.

How sad now never to see men holding hands, while everywhere one looks they are holding guns.

But I don't know how to fight. All I know how to do is stay alive.

The fact is that when you do something from your heart, you leave a heart print.

Most damage that others do us is out of fear, humiliation and pain. Those feelings occur in all of us, not just in those of us who profess a certain religious or racial devotion.

I can be almost terminally grief-stricken because things are so dire, but at the same time, there's a real lightheartedness about just the recoverability of life, of how things change, how they're not the same, ever again.

I think all documentaries leave out areas of people's lives. Which is good. There are areas that need not be explored.

All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.

The animals of the planet are in desperate peril... Without free animal life I believe we will lose the spiritual equivalent of oxygen.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.

The only way to solace anyone who loved you in life is to be a good memory

There's an ecstatic side to writing. It's like jazz. It just has a life.