Quotes By Alice Walker

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Horses make a landscape look beautiful.

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.

As you know from school, it's when you have not prepared for the test that you have the fear of failing. And if you have prepared, even if you fail, you've done your best.

What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears.

My mother was very strong. Once, she picked up a coconut and smashed it against my father's head. It taught me about women defending themselves and not collapsing in a heap.