Top 380 Alice Walker Quotes (2023 Update)
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251. “All her young life she has tried to please her father, never quite realizing that, as a girl, she never could.”

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker

253. “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

254. “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

255. “I think the foundation of everything in my life is wonder.”

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker

257. “There’s something in all of us that wants a medal for what we have done. That wants to be appreciated.”

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker

260. “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

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

— Alice Walker

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

265. “When you are active, and you must know this so well, that the more you are active, the more you see, the more you go to see. You know, you are curious. One thing leads to another thing, and it gets deeper and deeper, too. And there’s no end to it.”

— Alice Walker

266. “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

267. “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

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

— Alice Walker

269. “Artists are messengers whose responsibility is to unite the world – a faith that will lead not to destruction but to transformation.”

— Alice Walker

270. “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

271. “HELPED are those who love the entire cosmos rather than their own tiny country, city, or farm, for to them will be shown the unbroken web of life and the meaning of infinity.”

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

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

— Alice Walker

277. “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

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

— Alice Walker

279. “I realized I was a country person – I’m just not used to small spaces.”

— Alice Walker

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

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

— Alice Walker

284. “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

285. “What I am really interested in is that I want people to be thinking in other ways – to stop thinking they have to remain glued to a system that has failed and to ideas about society that’s necessarily about being run by Democrats or Republicans.”

— Alice Walker

286. “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

287. “The mysterious inner life that she had imagined gave them a secret joy was simply a full knowledge of the fact that they were dead, living just enough for their children.”

— Alice Walker

288. “It is a way of saying you must not live too much in your head. It is a way of reminding you to stay in your emotions, no matter how nutty they are; it is a way of saying, also, that craziness has value.”

— Alice Walker

289. “HELPED are those who live in quietness, knowing neither brand name nor fad; they shall live every day as if in eternity, and each moment shall be as full as it is long.”

— Alice Walker

290. “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.”

— Alice Walker

291. “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

292. “Just be what it is that you are, and that is just fine. You don’t have to be what you’re not in any way. Live that and live that fully, and that is where you discover ecstasy. You can’t really have ecstasy as something other than yourself.”

— Alice Walker

293. “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

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

— Alice Walker

295. “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

296. “I’m sure we, the American people, are the butt of jokes by those in power.”

— Alice Walker

297. “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

298. “I know what I’m thinking bout, I think. Nothing. And as much of it as I can.”

— Alice Walker

299. “I feel very happy to be living in Berkeley because there are a lot of people who are politically active here.”

— Alice Walker

300. “I had assumed that the Earth, the spirit of the Earth, noticed exceptions-those who wantonly damage it and those who do not. But the Earth is wise. It has given itself into the keeping of all, and all are therefore accountable.”

— Alice Walker