Alice Walker Quotes

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You bring children into the world. You love them with heart and soul.

When I was 18, I went to the Soviet Union. I kept hearing that America was planning to bomb them - lots of bombs were going to come down on these people. I went there not knowing anything, except that I thought the whole thing was stupid and that I wanted to see who these people were that we were going to bomb.

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

I know black people love the idea that we finally have a beautiful, good-looking black president. But if he is doing awful things to us, we should wake up.

It's very hard for our parents who see us enter a world that they can't imagine.

'Fame' exhausts me.

My parents were both storytellers. They always spoke with metaphorical richness.

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

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

I have a collective sense of suffering.

I believe you mother everybody, not in a cloying, hovering way, but taking care of what is around you.

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.

I cry so much less than I used to. I used to be one of the most teary people.

I was brought up to try to see what was wrong and right it. Since I am a writer, writing is how I right it.

If you deny people their own voice, you'll have no idea of who they were.

People really had a problem with my disinterest in submission. They had a problem with my intellect, and they had a problem with my choice of lovers. They had a problem with my choice of everything.

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.

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.

I cannot claim to have had a hard time publishing.

Nobody has ever convinced me that race is real.

You have to give others the opportunity to love who you love. If they don't accept it, it's their loss.

It is important to remember yourself.

We should not look down on our first ancestors.

Some writers sit down without a thought of what they are going to say, and they go through draft after draft.

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.

What's really hard is that you could care a lot for someone and not want to live with him anymore.

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

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.

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

Once you feel loved by the universe, you're already accepted, and you're not really concerned about offending people.

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

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

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 want the Israeli government to be made accountable for its behaviour to the Palestinians, and I want the people of the U.S. to cease acting as if they don't understand what is going on.

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.

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

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.

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.

June Jordan, who died of cancer in 2002, was a brilliant, fierce, radical, and frequently furious poet. We were friends for thirty years. Not once in that time did she step back from what was transpiring politically and morally in the world. She spoke up, and led her students, whom she adored, to do the same.

My interest in creating anything is that it be useful.

I'm very disappointed in Obama. I was very much in support of him in the beginning, but I cannot support war. I cannot support droning. I cannot support capitulating to the banks.

As far as a glass ceiling, I feel that all you can do is give it your absolute best with whatever gifts the universe has given you. And if you make it in some way that other people can recognize, that's fine. But even if you don't quote-unquote make it, you're fine if you've given it your whole heart and soul.

I know from having had a child, and from having been a child myself, that children will copy you.

I live a very secluded life, a very contemplative life and a very meditative one. That is my ideal life.

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.

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.

We must begin seeing other creatures as equal. Existence makes us all equal.

I just think cities are unnatural, basically. I know there are people who live happily in them, and I have cities that I love, too. But it's a disaster that we have moved so far from nature.

I never talk about my next project.

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.

Since the time of the witch burnings, the grandmothers and the healers and the midwives have been systematically targeted. And burned at the stake for hundreds of years, decimating whole communities.

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

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

I start each book when it's ready and never before.

We have to wake up. We have to refuse to be a clone.

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.

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.

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

I consider the fact that thousands of children die each day from starvation and a lack of medicine a crisis for humanity and a problem we must collectively attempt to solve.

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.

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.

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.

My family was a poor farming family, and we lived under absolute segregation.

There are thousands of Palestinians in prison virtually for no reason.

I continue to care for President Obama and for his family. I think that in many ways they are very courageous people, and I honor that, because I know what it means to live as a black person in a racist America.

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.

I have such respect for 'Democracy Now!'

I think Americans generally are not used to working very hard, in terms of working for the collective. I think in our country we have taken individualism to its farthest reaches, possibly.

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.

We must, all of us, learn actually not to have enemies, but only confused adversaries who are ourselves in disguise.

A good model of how to 'work with the enemy' internally is presented by the Dalai Lama, in his endless caretaking of his soul as he confronts the Chinese government that invaded Tibet.

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?

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

We must do everything in our power to cease the behaviour that makes children everywhere feel afraid.

When I joined the freedom movement in Mississippi in my early 20s, it was to come to the aid of sharecroppers, like my parents, who had been thrown off the land they'd always known - the plantations - because they attempted to exercise their 'democratic' right to vote.

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.

I can easily imagine Obama sitting down and talking to any leader - or any person - in the world, with no baggage of past servitude or race supremacy to mar their talks.

I met Howard Zinn in 1961, my first year at Spelman College in Atlanta. He was the tall, rangy, good-looking professor that many of the girls at Spelman swooned over.

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.

So many killings of black men in my lifetime. The physical shock is astounding.

I'm still living at least five parallel lives, honestly! I wonder about it. I have no idea how that happens.

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.

I love the women's movement, and I never thought of it as belonging to any particular segment of the population.

I deeply regret any harm, or any perceived harm, that I may have done to anyone by any behaviour of mine.

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

My mother had bought a sewing machine for me. When I went away to college, she gave me a sewing machine, a typewriter and a suitcase, and my mother made $17 a week working as a maid 12 hours a day, and she did that for me.

The dropping of bombs on people - isn't that terrorism?

I grew up in the South under segregation. So, I know what terrorism feels like - when your father could be taken out in the middle of the night and lynched just because he didn't look like he was in an obeying frame of mind when a white person said something he must do. I mean, that's terrorism, too.

I don't generally read reviews.

I prefer to praise people and the world rather than criticize them and it.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I just feel that 'The Color Purple,' which was my 10th book, was a true gift from my ancestors.

I think the foundation of everything in my life is wonder.

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.

It is natural to want to have a future.

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

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