Top 380 Alice Walker Quotes (2023 Update)
Page 5 of 8

201. “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.”

— Alice Walker

202. “There is so much we don’t understand. And so much unhappiness that comes because of that.”

— Alice Walker

203. “What is always needed in the appreciation of art, or life, is the larger perspective. Connections made, or at least attempted, where none existed before, the straining to encompass in one’s glance at the varied world the common thread, the unifying theme through immense diversity, a fearlessness of growth, of search, of looking, that enlarges the private and the public world. And yet, in our particular society, it is the narrowed and narrowing view of life that often wins.”

— Alice Walker

204. “HELPED are those whose ever act is a prayer for harmony in the Universe, for they are the restorers of balance to our planet. To them will be given the insight that every good act done anywhere in the cosmos welcomes the life of an animal or a child.”

— Alice Walker

205. “You must run around like a crazy person or walk sedately honoring the dead.”

— Alice Walker

206. “In every life there comes a point when you have to make a decision about how you will live.”

— Alice Walker

207. “What a burden to think one is conceived in sin rather than in pleasure; that one is born into evil rather than into joy.”

— Alice Walker

208. “My heart hurt so much I can’t believe it. How can it keep beating, feeling like this?”

— Alice Walker

209. “This was my first indication of the quality I feel is most characteristic of Zora’s work: racial health; a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings, a sense that is lacking in so much black writing and literature.”

— Alice Walker

210. “I think America has always been polarized. It’s a racist country and it has always been.”

— Alice Walker

211. “She say, Celie, tell the truth, have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show.”

— Alice Walker

212. “Listen, God loves everything you love, and a mess of stuff you don’t.”

— Alice Walker

213. “The quietly pacifist peaceful always die to make room for men who shout.”

— Alice Walker

214. “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?”

— Alice Walker

215. “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.”

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker

218. “God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it.”

— Alice Walker

219. “You can love yourself spiritually, physically – in almost any way that anybody else can.”

— Alice Walker

220. “If my mind is crowded with ideas or thoughts or plans or other people’s creations there is less room for my own.”

— Alice Walker

221. “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.”

— Alice Walker

222. “It just seems clear to me that as long as we are all here, it’s pretty clear that the struggle is to share the planet, rather than divide it.”

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker

224. “Sofia the kind of woman no matter what she have in her hand she make it look like a weapon.”

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker

226. “Helped are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception and realize a partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful.”

— Alice Walker

227. “When Toni Morrison said she writes the kind of books she wants to read, she was acknowledging the fact that in a society in which “accepted literature” is so often sexist and racist and otherwise irrelevant or offensive to so many lives, she must do the work of two. She must be her own model as well as the artist attending, creating, learning from, realizing the model, which is to say, herself.”

— Alice Walker

228. “Life is very different when you have a good friend. I’ve seen people without special friends, close friends. Other men, especially. For some reason men don’t often make and keep friends. This is a real tragedy, I think, because in a way, without a tight male friend, you never really are able to see yourself.”

— Alice Walker

229. “He is a very sensitive soul who hears what isn’t said as clearly as what is.”

— Alice Walker

230. “Sofia take up the clothes, straighten them out, stand by the ironing board with her hand on the iron. Sofia the kind of woman no matter what she have in her hand it look like a weapon.”

— Alice Walker

231. “Those in power must spend a lot of their time laughing at us.”

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker

233. “Helped are those who are content to be themselves; they will never lack mystery in their lives and the joys of self-discovery will be constant.”

— Alice Walker

234. “I don’t know nothing, I think. And glad of it.”

— Alice Walker

235. “Writing about people helps us to understand them, and understanding them helps us to accept them as part of ourselves.”

— Alice Walker

236. “Women have to summon courage to fulfill dormant dreams.”

— Alice Walker

237. “What gardening teaches us is that if you plant things, they’ll come up. But you have to be willing to wait for them to bear fruit because things are seasonal.”

— Alice Walker

238. “HELPED are those who lose their fear of death; theirs is the power to envision the future in a blade of grass.”

— Alice Walker

239. “His little whistle sound like it lost way down a jar, and the jar in the bottom of the creek. P. 64.”

— Alice Walker

240. “I can be almost terminally grief-stricken because things are so dire, but at the same, there’s a real lightheartednes s about just the recoverability of life, of how things change, how they’re not the same, ever again.”

— Alice Walker

241. “Don’t look like nothing, she say. It ain’t a picture show. It ain’t something you can look at apart from anything else, including yourself. I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you’ve found It.”

— Alice Walker

242. “Resist the temptation to think what afflicts you is peculiar to you. Have faith that what is in your consciousness can be communicated to the consciousness of all. And is, in many cases, already there.”

— Alice Walker

243. “If you’re silent for a long time, people just arrive in your mind.”

— Alice Walker

244. “Animals were not made for us, or our use. They have their own use, which is just being who they are.”

— Alice Walker

245. “HELPED are those who love all the colors of all the human beings, as they love all the colors of the animals and plants; none of their children, nor any of their ancestors, nor any parts of themselves, shall be hidden from them.”

— Alice Walker

246. “Helped are those who laugh with a pure heart; theirs will be the company of the jolly righteous.”

— Alice Walker

247. “Aside from the fact that they say it’s unhealthy, my fat ain’t never been no trouble. Mens always have loved me. My kids ain’t never complained. Plus they’s fat.”

— Alice Walker

248. “The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate.”

— Alice Walker

249. “Even now, I find that no matter what has happened, I still have that trust. I have a lot of trust, that people can be better than they are.”

— Alice Walker

250. “People tend to think that life really does progress for everyone eventually, that people progress, but actually only some people progress. The rest of the people don’t.”

— Alice Walker