Alice Walker Quotes

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

~ Alice Walker

Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.

~ Alice Walker

You are all talking a bit too much, said Armando, who had cautioned them from the beginning to stay out of popular culture and in their own interior worlds.When you are caught up in the world that you did not design as support for your life and the life of earth and people, it is like being caught in someone else's dream or nightmare. Many people exist in their lives in this way. I say exist because it is not really living. It is akin to being suspended in a dream one is having at night, a dream over which one has no control. You are going here and there, seeing this and that person; you do not know or care about them usually, they are just there, on your interior screen. Humankind will not survive if we continue in this way, most of us living lives in which our own life is not the center.

~ Alice Walker

It is justice and respect that I want the world to dust off and put - without delay, and with tenderness - back on the head of the Palestinian child. It will be imperfect justice and respect because the injustice and disrespect have been so severe. But I believe we are right to try.

~ Alice Walker

If you want to have a life that is worth living, a life that expresses your deepest feelings and emotions and cares and dreams, you have to fight for it.

~ Alice Walker

Women have to summon up courage to fulfill dormant dreams.

~ Alice Walker

War contributes greatly to global warming, which shouldn't surprise us. All those bombs going off, all those rockets, all those planes and helicopters. All that fuel of various kinds being used. It pollutes the air and water of this very fragile and interconnected planet.

~ Alice Walker

I think 'The Color Purple' is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the need for connection around the globe.

~ Alice Walker

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

~ Alice Walker

I understood at a very early age that in nature, I felt everything I should feel in church but never did. Walking in the woods, I felt in touch with the universe and with the spirit of the universe.

~ Alice Walker

Howard Zinn was magical as a teacher. Witty, irreverent, and wise, he loved what he was teaching and clearly wanted his students to love it, also.

~ Alice Walker

Clearly older women and especially older women who have led an active life or elder women who successfully maneuver through their own family life have so much to teach us about sharing, patience, and wisdom.

~ Alice Walker

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.

~ Alice Walker

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

~ Alice Walker

If we want to fight people in the world, we should fight them with pillows - pillows stuffed with food, medicine, music... That would be so much cheaper than bombs.

~ Alice Walker

I don't call myself a Buddhist. I'm a free spirit. I believe I'm here on earth to admire and enjoy it that's my religion.

~ Alice Walker

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.'

~ Alice Walker

'Thank you' is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.

~ Alice Walker

Life is abundant, and life is beautiful. And it's a good place that we're all in, you know, on this earth, if we take care of it.

~ Alice Walker

All History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world.

~ Alice Walker

Propaganda is amazing. People can be led to believe anything.

~ Alice Walker

This is a wonderful planet, and it is being completely destroyed by people who have too much money and power and no empathy.

~ Alice Walker

Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.

~ Alice Walker

As long as the people don't fear the truth, there is hope. For once they fear it, the one who tells it doesn't stand a chance. And today, truth is still beautiful... but so frightening.

~ Alice Walker

The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate.

~ Alice Walker

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.

~ Alice Walker

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.

~ Alice Walker

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

~ Alice Walker

In search of my mother's garden, I found my own.

~ Alice Walker

I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.

~ Alice Walker

I made my first white women friends in college; they loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered.

~ Alice Walker

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.

~ Alice Walker

Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.

~ Alice Walker

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

~ Alice Walker

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.

~ Alice Walker

Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.

~ Alice Walker

For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn't poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.

~ Alice Walker

The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one's people that has not previously been taken into account.

~ Alice Walker

For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle; and one faces down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged.

~ Alice Walker