Top 380 Alice Walker Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “I realized I was a country person – I’m just not used to small spaces.”

— Alice Walker

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

305. “Religion is an elaborate excuse for what man has done to women and to the earth.”

— Alice Walker

306. “I could never live happily in Africa-or anywhere else-until I could live freely in Mississippi.”

— Alice Walker

307. “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

308. “But one thing I do thank her for, for teaching me to learn for myself, by reading and studying and writing a clear hand.”

— Alice Walker

309. “Of what was plastic made? What died? He knew it was a product of petroleum, of oil, and so he assumed plastic was made out of the very lifeblood of the planet. When all the oil was drained, he imagined the planet quaking and shrinking in on itself, like a squeezed orange that has been sucked to death. He.”

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker

311. “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

312. “I think humanity has forgotten – this planet is for joy.”

— Alice Walker

313. “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

314. “After all, how can a society flourish, a country attain democracy and health, children grow into intelligent beings, sensitive to the needs of an ever more fragile and endangered planet, if half it’s people are kept out of the driver’s seat?”

— Alice Walker

315. “Poetry, I have discovered, is always unexpected and always as faithful and honest as dreams.”

— Alice Walker

316. “Many people are aware that we are in peril and that there is no trustworthy leadership.”

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker

318. “I can easily imagine Obama sitting down and talking to any leader – or any person – in the world, with no baggage of past servitude or race supremacy to mar their talks.”

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker

320. “I’m the kind of woman that likes to enjoy herselves in peace.”

— Alice Walker

321. “And when they spy on us let them discover us loving.”

— Alice Walker

322. “When Pa tell you to do something, you do it, he say. When he say not to, you don’t. You don’t do what he say, he beat you. Sometime beat me anyhow, I say, whether I do what he say or not. That’s right, say Harpo. But not Sofia. She do what she want, don’t pay me no mind at all. I try to beat her, she black my eyes. Oh, boo-hoo, he cry. Boo-hoo-hoo.”

— Alice Walker

323. “In that story I gathered up the historical and psychological threads of the life my ancestors lived, and in the writing of it I felt joy and strength and my own continuity. I had that wonderful feeling writers get sometimes, not very often, of being with a great many people, ancient spirits, all very happy to see me consulting and acknowledging them, and eager to let me know, through the joy of their presence, that, indeed, I am not alone.”

— Alice Walker

324. “The world was almost at the point of forgetting what a fine time people can have helping one another. That people like to work together and to kick back after work and share their experiences. What would happen if our foreign policy centered on the cultivation of joy rather than pain? she thought.”

— Alice Walker

325. “Because he understood very well what was making her sick. For the first time in her life she had fallen in love at the same time that she had the experience necessary to know it would never work out.”

— Alice Walker

326. “I think there is a sense of being forced at this time to look at America’s really large shadow and that’s not all that bad.”

— Alice Walker

327. “Just because I don’t harass it like some peoples us know don’t mean I ain’t got religion.”

— Alice Walker

328. “They be marching hand in hand, like going to war.”

— Alice Walker

329. “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.”

— Alice Walker

330. “In our particular society, it is the narrowed and narrowing view of life that often wins.”

— Alice Walker

331. “Love likes to extend itself. If you receive it in a book – or however you get it – then your duty is to extend it beyond.”

— Alice Walker

332. “In the far upper corner of my altar is a photo of Joan Crawford in her most fierce Mommy Dearest mode, just to remind me of some of the cost of everyone’s hard-earned sweetness and light.”

— Alice Walker

333. “Peace”: the fruit of justice done especially to the Self.”

— Alice Walker

334. “You seem so clear about who you are. So certain that you are just right as you are, that for all your intelligence and maybe in spite of it, you never seem to need a second opinion.”

— Alice Walker

335. “There was a saying among the Mundo: It takes only one lie to unravel the world.”

— Alice Walker

336. “You know Shug will fight, he say. Just like Sofia. She bound to live her life and be herself no matter what.”

— Alice Walker

337. “I don’t know who tried to teach him what to do in the bedroom, but it must have been a furniture salesman.”

— Alice Walker

338. “Two old fools left over from love.”

— Alice Walker

339. “They think, after the biggest of the white folks no longer on the earth, the only way to stop making somebody the serpent is for everybody to accept everybody else as a child of God, or one mother’s children, no matter what they look like or how they act.”

— Alice Walker

340. “I’m for women choosing whatever they want to do but they have to really know what they are doing.”

— Alice Walker

341. “Standing beside the river, realizing that the water of earth is recycled forever, she deeply understood this: that there are two “presents.” One is of the moment. The other is of a longer moment – the “moment” that includes the history and knowledge one knows. So that, she mused, if the tears shed by the mother of Isis are now part of this river then I am somehow connected to her in this longer “present” that I am able to envision and that contains both of us.”

— Alice Walker

342. “Everything want to be loved.”

— Alice Walker

343. “The colonizing mind invites itself wherever it wishes to intrude; it is a worthwhile practice for the coming millennium to train ourselves away from such a mind.”

— Alice Walker

344. “My writing is very organic. It’s what I am. My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig. So I think of it as something that’s very essential to my being.”

— Alice Walker

345. “Susannah was glad that, on principle, she rarely listened to men. Rarely believed, really, a word they said. No matter how much she might love them.”

— Alice Walker

346. “Why us always have family reunion on July 4th, say Henrietta, mouth poke out, full of complaint. It so hot. White people busy celebrating they independence from England July 4th, say Harpo, so most black folks don’t have to work. Us can spend the day celebrating each other.”

— Alice Walker

347. “Hard to be Christ too, say Shug. But he manage. Remember that. Thou Shalt Not Kill, He said. And probably wanted to add on to that, Starting with me. He knowed the fools he was dealing with.”

— Alice Walker

348. “The heaving sickness past, her nausea gone, her bodily fluids replaced, she felt the lightness of being in the open space around her. Her walls the canyon’s walls, she owned them not at all; her floor, the river beach. Her view, the heavens. It was, this freedom she was in, the longed-for cathedral of her dreams.”

— Alice Walker

349. “Why should the killers of the world be “the future” and not us?”

— Alice Walker

350. “I think Africans are very much like white people back home, in that they think they are the center of the universe and that everything that is done is done for them.”

— Alice Walker