Quotes By Alice Walker

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.

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.

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.

The most important question in the world is, 'Why is the child crying?'

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.

Never be the only one, except, possibly, in your own home.

Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.

I think there is a sense of being forced at this time to look at America's really large shadow and that's not all that bad.

I try to teach my heart not to want things it can't have.

I think writing really helps you heal yourself. I think if you write long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write, as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame.

Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.

I love us so incredibly, insanely deeply; it's almost unbearable to see what we do to ourselves.

Part of what confuses people in times of upheaval is that you're getting so many different points of view and directions and so and so, how to do this and do that. And a lot of it is written in a language that honestly most people cannot understand.

Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.

I have never felt that the one thing that I am 'known for' is what I am.

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

Sucking up to the biggies won't get us anywhere.

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.

For a long time, I thought I was ugly and disfigured. This made me shy and timid, and I often reacted to insults that were not intended.