Top 380 Alice Walker Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

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

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker

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

— Alice Walker

355. “I’m mad about the waste that happens when people who love each other can’t even bring themselves to talk.”

— Alice Walker

356. “I live a very secluded life, a very contemplative life and a very meditative one. That is my ideal life.”

— Alice Walker

357. “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

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

— Alice Walker

359. “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

360. “There is a special grief felt by the children and grandchildren of those who were forbidden to read, forbidden to question or to know.”

— Alice Walker

361. “Perhaps this is simply the way it is with writers. It’s when they don’t see you that you matter. Because then you can belong to them in a way that permits them complete possession. You are determined by them. You are controlled. You are, generally speaking, exaggerated.”

— Alice Walker

362. “In my opinion and experience, imperialists of all nations and races will tell us anything to keep us fighting. For them.”

— Alice Walker

363. “I continue to care for President Obama and for his family. I think that in many ways they are very courageous people, and I honor that, because I know what it means to live as a black person in a racist America.”

— Alice Walker

364. “As an elder of the Americas and of the rest of the planet, it is my responsibility to care for and protect, to the best of my ability, the young.”

— Alice Walker

365. “But I don’t think us feel old at all. And us so happy. Matter of fact, I think this is the youngest us felt.”

— Alice Walker

366. “Helped are those too busy living to respond when they are wrongfully attacked: on their walks they shall find mysteries so intriguing as to distract them from every blow.”

— Alice Walker

367. “She noticed that other girls were falling in love, getting married. It seemed to produce a state of euphoria in them. She became unsure that her own way of living was as pleasant as she thought it was. It seemed to have an aimlessness to it that did not lead anywhere. Day followed day, and the calm level of her pleasures as a single woman remained constant. Certainly she never reached euphoria. And she wanted euphoria to add to the other good feelings she had.”

— Alice Walker

368. “I love the natural world – it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved.”

— Alice Walker

369. “I can imagine in years to come that my papers and memorabilia, my journals and letters, will find themselves always in the company of people who care about many of the things I do.”

— Alice Walker

370. “The more powerful the powerful appear the more invisible they become, said Armando. This used to work differently than now. In the old days it was said that the powerful merged with the divine and the divine was all that one saw. But now the powerful have merged with the shadow, really with death, and when you encounter them they are really hard to see.”

— Alice Walker

371. “There’s no return from this, no way we will ever come back together again. She tried to accept this clarity as a gift.”

— Alice Walker

372. “I don’t know if you actually get something out of writing poetry. I think poetry is an autonomous muse that decides to come and sit on your couch.”

— Alice Walker

373. “I have never felt that the one thing that I am ‘known for’ is what I am.”

— Alice Walker

374. “I started out as a poet. I’ve always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.”

— Alice Walker

375. “I wash her body, it feels like I’m praying. My hands tremble and my breath short.”

— Alice Walker

376. “June a good time to go off into the world.”

— Alice Walker

377. “She thought of how diligently she’d worked to free herself. Difficult because of the shock she was in, discovering she was trapped, captured most of all by possessions.”

— Alice Walker

378. “It’s worse than unwelcome, said Samuel. The Africans don’t even see us. They don’t even recognize us as the brothers and sisters they sold.”

— Alice Walker

379. “I recognized myself in Jane Eyre. It amazes me how many white people can’t read themselves in black characters. I didn’t feel any separation between me and Jane. We were tight.”

— Alice Walker

380. “I dead parting from them because in the short time we’ve been together they’ve been like family to me. Like family might have been, I mean.”

— Alice Walker

381. “He love looking at Shug. I love looking at Shug. But Shug don’t love looking at but one of us. Him. But that the way it spose to be. I know that. But if that so, why my heart hurt me so?”

— Alice Walker

382. “This book is dedicated with tenderness and respect to the blameless vulva.”

— Alice Walker

383. “I can spend two hours grubbing about in my garden, dazed with pleasure and intent, and it feels like five minutes.”

— Alice Walker

384. “That though the heart is breaking, happiness can exist in a moment, also.”

— Alice Walker

385. “Can you picture it at all, Celie? Because I felt like i was seeing black for the first time. And Celie, there is something magical about it. Because the black is so black the eye is simply dazzled, and there is the shining that seems to come, really from moonlight, it is so luminous, but their skin glows even in the sun.”

— Alice Walker

386. “The challenge for me is not to be a follower of Something but to embody it;.”

— Alice Walker

387. “Our mothers taught us that in the old, old days, when they were their grandmothers and their grandmothers were old – for we are our grandmothers, you understand, only with lots of new and different things added.”

— Alice Walker

388. “There is for human beings no greater hell to fear than the one on earth.”

— Alice Walker

389. “Several months ago, when Israel “annexed” the Golan Heights, a Jewish friend of mine visited that country. Upon his return he explained that Israel needed that land to protect itself from the possibility of enemy shells, apparently lobbed off its cliffs, into Israel. “But doesn’t that land belong to people?” I asked. “They’re not doing anything with it,” he replied. I thought: I have a backyard I’m not ‘doing anything with.’ Does that give you the right to take it?”

— Alice Walker

390. “And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see; or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read. Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength – in search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.”

— Alice Walker

391. “I wish you were with me, or I with you.”

— Alice Walker

392. “Heaven. Now there’s a thought. Nothing has ever been able, ultimately, to convince me we live anywhere else. And that heaven, more a verb than a noun, more a condition than a place, is about leading with the heart in whatever broken or ragged state it’s in, stumbling forward in faith until, from time to time, we miraculously find our way.”

— Alice Walker

393. “She was someone who could not be rushed. This seems a small thing. But it is actually a very amazing quality, a very ancient one. She did everything at just the same pace as before, she could tell the time of day or night by the moisture in the atmosphere, and she went about her business as if she would live forever, and forever was very, very long. That is the kind of mujer my mama was. When you look at me you see her, but I have lost ‘forever’; therefore I sometimes hurry.”

— Alice Walker

394. “But I don’t want you to fight ’em until you gits completely fagged so that you turns into a black cracker yourself! For then they bondage over you in complete.”

— Alice Walker

395. “We were not meant to suffer so much and learn nothing.”

— Alice Walker

396. “The news always sound crazy. People fussing and fighting and pointing fingers at other people, and never even looking for no peace.”

— Alice Walker