Quotes By Alice Walker

Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week.

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

My work is about my life, and what I want to do with it.

My life is not to be somebody else's impact - you know what I mean?

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.

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.

Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me.

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.

There are those who believe Black people possess the secret of joy and that it is this that will sustain them through any spiritual or moral or physical devastation.

Israel is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people, both inside Israel and also in the Occupied Territories.

I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.

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

I'm the most stubborn person I know.

I was distressed that after 9/11, when the United States was attacked by terrorists, the United States' response was to attack Afghanistan, where some of the terrorists had been.

It's so clear that you have to cherish everyone. I think that's what I get from these older black women, that every soul is to be cherished, that every flower Is to bloom.

I see children, all children, as humanity's most precious resource, because it will be to them that the care of the planet will always be left.

Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?

We should learn to accept that change is truly the only thing that's going on always, and learn to ride with it and enjoy it.

Language is an intrinsic part of who we are and what has, for good or evil, happened to us.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

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

I'm sure we, the American people, are the butt of jokes by those in power.

And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see - or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.

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.

Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors.

To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.

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.

Well, capitalism is a big problem, because with capitalism you're just going to keep buying and selling things until there's nothing else to buy and sell, which means gobbling up the planet.

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.

As an elder of the Americas and of the rest of the planet, it is my responsibility to care for and protect, to the best of my ability, the young.