Quotes By Alice Walker

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.

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.

In my work and in myself I reflect black people, women and men, as I reflect others. One day even the most self-protective ones will look into the mirror I provide and not be afraid.

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.

I just like to have words that describe things correctly. Now to me, 'black feminist' does not do that. I need a word that is organic, that really comes out of the culture, that really expresses the spirit that we see in black women. And it's just... womanish.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I'm for women choosing whatever they want to do but they have to really know what they are doing.

Horses make a landscape look beautiful.

All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.

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.

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.

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

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

Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.

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

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