Top 380 Alice Walker Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “There is no graceful way to carry hatred.”

— Alice Walker

202. “What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers’ time? In our great-grandmothers’ day? It is an answer cruel enough to stop the blood.”

— Alice Walker

203. “The good news may be that Nature is phasing out the white man, but the bad news is that’s who She thinks we all are.”

— Alice Walker

204. “My life is not to be somebody else’s impact – you know what I mean?”

— Alice Walker

205. “I talk to myself a lot, standing in front the mirror. Celie, I say, happiness was just a trick in your case. Just cause you never had any before Shug, you thought it was time to have some, and that it was gon last. Even thought you had the trees with you. The whole earth. The stars. But look at you. When Shug left, happiness desert.”

— Alice Walker

206. “When I offered the word “Womanism” many years ago, it was to give us a tool to use, as feminist women of color, in times like these. These are the moments we can see clearly, and must honor devotedly, our singular path as women of color in the United States. We are not white women and this truth has been ground into us for centuries, often in brutal ways.”

— Alice Walker

207. “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.”

— Alice Walker

208. “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

209. “Laughter isn’t even the other side of tears. It is tears turned inside out. Truly the suffering is great, here on earth.”

— Alice Walker

210. “Men make war to get attention. All killing is an expression of self-hate.”

— Alice Walker

211. “Hard times’ is a phrase the English love to use, when speaking of Africa. And it is easy to forget that Africa’s ‘hard times’ were made harder by them.”

— Alice Walker

212. “I’ve found, in my own writing, that a little hatred, keenly directed, is a useful thing.”

— Alice Walker

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

— 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. “You know a little drink now and then never hurt nobody, but when you can’t git started without asking the bottle, you in trouble.”

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker

218. “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.”

— Alice Walker

219. “One thing that never ceases to amaze me, along with the growth of vegetation from the earth and of hair from the head, is the growth of understanding.”

— Alice Walker

220. “To know is to exist; to exist is to be involved, to move about, to see the world with my own eyes.”

— Alice Walker

221. “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

222. “I have fought and kicked and fasted and prayed and cursed and cried myself to the point of existing.”

— Alice Walker

223. “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.”

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

— Alice Walker

226. “Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.”

— Alice Walker

227. “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

228. “You must learn to love only that which cannot be stolen.”

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker

232. “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

233. “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

234. “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

235. “Healing cannot be done by settling a score.”

— Alice Walker

236. “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

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

— Alice Walker

238. “It seems wiser to do as hermit crabs do, find a shell and inhabit it.”

— Alice Walker

239. “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.”

— Alice Walker

240. “But if by some miracle and all our struggle, the earth is spared, only justice to every living being will save humankind.”

— Alice Walker

241. “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

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

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker

244. “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

245. “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

246. “All her young life she has tried to please her father, never quite realizing that, as a girl, she never could.”

— Alice Walker

247. “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

248. “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

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

— Alice Walker

250. “World wars have been fought and lost; for every war is against the world and every war against the world is lost.”

— Alice Walker