Top 380 Alice Walker Quotes (2023 Update)
Page 7 of 8

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

— Alice Walker

302. “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

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

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker

305. “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

306. “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

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

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

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

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker

316. “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

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

— Alice Walker

318. “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

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

— Alice Walker

320. “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

321. “HELPED are those who are shown the existence of the Creator’s magic in the Universe; they shall experience delight and astonishment without ceasing.”

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker

324. “Without money of one’s own in a capitalist society, there is no such thing as independence.”

— Alice Walker

325. “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

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

— Alice Walker

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

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

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker

332. “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

333. “In order to be able to live at all in America I must be unafraid to live anywhere in it, and I must be able to live in the fashion and with whom I choose.”

— Alice Walker

334. “Criticism is painful when it’s not done with love.”

— Alice Walker

335. “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

336. “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

337. “That was the beginning of her abstraction.”

— Alice Walker

338. “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

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

— Alice Walker

341. “Part of what confuses people in times of upheaval is that you’re getting so many different points of view and directions and so and so, how to do this and do that. And a lot of it is written in a language that honestly most people cannot understand.”

— Alice Walker

342. “I do not grieve in the abstract, but in the heart.”

— Alice Walker

343. “Then she added thoughtfully, “And that old woman that turned me off so short got down so bad in the end that she was walking on two sticks.” And I knew she was thinking, though she never said it: Here I am today, my eight children healthy and grown and three of them in college and me with hardly a sick day for years. Ain’t Jesus wonderful?”

— Alice Walker

344. “We do not believe in heaven or hell... ; we do not believe in eternal damnation. We believe only in the unavoidable horror of hurting others and of likewise being hurt.”

— Alice Walker

345. “The earth is wise. It has given itself into the keeping of all, and all are therefore accountable.”

— Alice Walker

346. “Everything want to be loved.”

— Alice Walker

347. “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

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

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker