Top 380 Alice Walker Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 6 of 8

251. “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

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

— Alice Walker

253. “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

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

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker

257. “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. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don’t know what you looking for. Trouble.”

— Alice Walker

258. “If she come, I be happy. If she don’t, I be content.”

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker

260. “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

261. “If she come, I be happy. If she don’t, I be content. And then I figure this the lesson I was suppose tolearn.”

— Alice Walker

262. “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

263. “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

264. “But if God love me, Celie, I don’t have to do all that. Unless I want to. There’s a lot of other things I can do that I speck God likes. Like what? I ast. Oh, she say. I can lay back and just admire stuff. Be happy. Have a good time.”

— Alice Walker

265. “It must become a right of every person to die of old age. And if we secure this right for ourselves, we can, coincidentally, assure it for the planet.”

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

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

— Alice Walker

273. “God is different to us now, after all these years in Africa. More spirit than ever before, and more internal. Most people think he has to look like something or someone- a roofleaf or Christ- but we don’t. And not being tied to what God looks like, frees us.”

— Alice Walker

274. “If a person is hit hard enough, even if she stands, she falls.”

— Alice Walker

275. “For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.”

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker

277. “No one escapes a time in life when the arrow of sorrow, of anger, of despair pierces the heart. For many of us, there is the inevitable need to circle the wound. It is often such a surprise to find it there, in us, when we had assumed arrows so painful only landed in the hearts of other people. Some of us spend decades screaming at the archer. Or at least for longer periods than are good for us. How to take the arrow out of the heart? How to learn to relieve our own pain? That is the question.”

— Alice Walker

278. “Dear Nettie, I don’t write to God no more, I write to you.”

— Alice Walker

279. “Any God I ever found in church, I brought in myself.”

— Alice Walker

280. “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.”

— Alice Walker

281. “Then he say something that really surprise me cause it so thoughtful and common sense. When it come to what folks do together with they bodies, he say, anybody’s guess is as good as mine. But when you talk about love I don’t have to guess. I have love and I have been love. And I thank God he let me gain understanding enough to know love can’t be halted just cause some peoples moan and groan.”

— Alice Walker

282. “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

283. “It’s so clear that you have to cherish everyone.”

— Alice Walker

284. “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

285. “Tashi’s mother and father were just here. They are upset because she spends so much time with Olivia. She is changing, becoming quiet and too thoughtful, they say. She is becoming someone else; her face is beginning to show the spirit of one of her aunts who was sold to the trader because she no longer fit into village life. This aunt refused to marry the man chosen for her. Refused to bow to the chief. Did nothing but lay up, crack cola nuts between her teeth and giggle.”

— Alice Walker

286. “Now I understand that all great teachers love us. This is essentially what makes them great. I also understand that it is this love that never dies, and that, having once experienced it, we have the confidence always exhibited by well-loved humans, to continue extending this same love.”

— Alice Walker

287. “How we come into this world, how we are ushered in, met, and hopefully embraced upon arrival, impacts the whole of our time on earth.”

— Alice Walker

288. “Anyhow, I say, the God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgitful, and lowdown.”

— Alice Walker

289. “I am not convinced that men and women were ever meant to share the same house, though some people can do it beautifully.”

— Alice Walker

290. “Let ’im hear me, I say. If he ever listened to poor colored women the world would be a different place, I can tell you.”

— Alice Walker

291. “I love children say Sofia. But all the colored women that say they love yours is lying. They don’t love Reynolds Stanley any more than I do. But if you so badly raise as to ast ’em, what you expect them to say? Some colored people so scared of whitefolks they claim to love the cotton gin.”

— Alice Walker

292. “I think the War on Terror is really absurd, especially coming from a country that is founded on terrorism.”

— Alice Walker

293. “May our call be from this day onward, to all the creatures and beings of the planet who have no voice: I have come to you, for you, to be a witness to your life and to extend whatever understanding and happiness I can.”

— Alice Walker

294. “People who think nonviolence is easy don’t realize that it’s a spiritual discipline that requires a great deal of strength, growth, and purging of the self so that one can overcome almost any obstacle for the good of all without being concerned about one’s own welfare.”

— Alice Walker

295. “Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.”

— Alice Walker

296. “Howard Zinn was magical as a teacher. Witty, irreverent, and wise, he loved what he was teaching and clearly wanted his students to love it, also.”

— Alice Walker

297. “Creation is a sustained period of bliss.”

— Alice Walker

298. “As you sit, make peace also with the reality that, after you die, it won’t matter to you how you are remembered; you will not be here to experience it. All the grand things that you do or say, all the skyscrapers you build and cover with gold, your elegant tombstone, all will be completely forgotten eventually. Even your children, and their children, too, will be forgotten. That being so, perhaps it is best to begin to erase your presence well before you leave the scene.”

— Alice Walker

299. “That she had seen the magazines we receive from home and that it was very clear to her that black people did not truly admire blackskinned black people like herself, and especially did not admire blackskinned black women. They bleach their faces, she said. They fry their hair. They try to look naked.”

— Alice Walker

300. “Drew Dellinger is a deep and courageous poet. How lucky we are!”

— Alice Walker