Alice Walker

I try to teach my heart not to want things it can't have.

'Thank you' is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.

I don't feel I've had a decent critic ever on the East coast.

We should learn to accept that change is truly the only thing that's going on always, and learn to ride with it and enjoy it.

The fact is that when you do something from your heart, you leave a heart print.

It is because I recognize the brutality with which my own multi-branched ancestors have been treated that I can identify the despicable, lawless, cruel, and sadistic behavior that has characterized Israel's attempts to erase a people, the Palestinians, from their own land.

The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one's people that has not previously been taken into account.

I have such respect for 'Democracy Now!'

The artist...is the voice of the people.

It's not possible to stop love.

Part of our tradition as black women is that we are universalists. Black children, yellow children, red children, brown children, that is the black woman's normal, day-to-day relationship. In my family alone, we are about four different colors.

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.

My mother had bought a sewing machine for me. When I went away to college, she gave me a sewing machine, a typewriter and a suitcase, and my mother made $17 a week working as a maid 12 hours a day, and she did that for me.

I think Americans generally are not used to working very hard, in terms of working for the collective. I think in our country we have taken individualism to its farthest reaches, possibly.

Many readers fail to realize this, but 'The Color Purple' is a theological text. It is about the reclamation of one's original God: the earth and nature.

The dropping of bombs on people - isn't that terrorism?

You cannot see the changes that you're dreaming about, because they're internal.

I think that I do feel that my nature is to express what this self, this particular self at this time, experiences in the world. And that is so organic - I use this metaphor a lot but I'll use it again - it's like a pine tree producing pine cones, or a blackberry bush producing blackberries - it's just what happens with this being, now.

I see children, all children, as humanity's most precious resource, because it will be to them that the care of the planet will always be left.

I never have an intended audience. I just write, you know.

Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors.

Can people who hunger so desperately for what other people have ever have enough

They be marching hand in hand, like going to war.

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's "mature" critics often are.

As long as the people don't fear the truth, there is hope. For once they fear it, the one who tells it doesn't stand a chance. And today, truth is still beautiful... but so frightening.

Healing begins where the wound was made.

Thank you is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude humility understanding.

I don't have this feeling that 70 is really old.

Be an outcast be pleased to walk alone.

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

My family was a poor farming family, and we lived under absolute segregation.

Is solace anywhere more comforting than in the arms of a sister.

I met Howard Zinn in 1961, my first year at Spelman College in Atlanta. He was the tall, rangy, good-looking professor that many of the girls at Spelman swooned over.

I have never felt that the one thing that I am 'known for' is what I am.

As far as a glass ceiling, I feel that all you can do is give it your absolute best with whatever gifts the universe has given you. And if you make it in some way that other people can recognize, that's fine. But even if you don't quote-unquote make it, you're fine if you've given it your whole heart and soul.

Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.

You bring children into the world. You love them with heart and soul.

I see myself in all the people in the world who are suffering and who are very badly treated and who are often made to feel that they have no place on this Earth.

Even as I hold you, I am letting you go.

Sexuality is one of the ways that we become enlightened, actually, because it leads us to self-knowledge.

A good model of how to 'work with the enemy' internally is presented by the Dalai Lama, in his endless caretaking of his soul as he confronts the Chinese government that invaded Tibet.

I dont need a certain number of friends just a number of friends I can be certain of.

It's an awful feeling to write something that you feel is really important... and to feel that you're being published by people who really don't get it and/or don't really care.

At one point I learned transcendental meditation. This was 30-something years ago. It took me back to the way that I naturally was as a child growing up way in the country, rarely seeing people. I was in that state of oneness with creation and it was as if I didn't exist except as a part of everything.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Women have to summon up courage to fulfill dormant dreams.

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.

People do not wish to appear foolish to avoid the appearance of foolishness they are willing to remain actually fools.

'Fame' exhausts me.

David Icke reminded me of Malcolm X.

I prefer to praise people and the world rather than criticize them and it.

It's so clear that you have to cherish everyone. I think that's what I get from these older black women, that every soul is to be cherished, that every flower Is to bloom.

I was brought up to try to see what was wrong and right it. Since I am a writer, writing is how I right it.

Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.

It is important to remember yourself.

We must, all of us, learn actually not to have enemies, but only confused adversaries who are ourselves in disguise.

I wanted in my lifetime to vote for a radical Native American woman, since my vision of any future that we might have is that it will be led by women and older women.

I'm tri-racial: African-American, Native American and Euro - that's the Scotch-Irish part.

Most damage that others do us is out of fear, humiliation and pain. Those feelings occur in all of us, not just in those of us who profess a certain religious or racial devotion.

Part of my ancestry is Cherokee. And in that tradition, you become an adult when you're 52.

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

'Thank you' is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.

Well, capitalism is a big problem, because with capitalism you're just going to keep buying and selling things until there's nothing else to buy and sell, which means gobbling up the planet.

Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.

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.

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.

It is justice and respect that I want the world to dust off and put - without delay, and with tenderness - back on the head of the Palestinian child. It will be imperfect justice and respect because the injustice and disrespect have been so severe. But I believe we are right to try.

I cannot claim to have had a hard time publishing.

What's really hard is that you could care a lot for someone and not want to live with him anymore.

War contributes greatly to global warming, which shouldn't surprise us. All those bombs going off, all those rockets, all those planes and helicopters. All that fuel of various kinds being used. It pollutes the air and water of this very fragile and interconnected planet.

We have to wake up. We have to refuse to be a clone.

I gave my archive to Emory University because there's a really dear friend who teaches there, Rudolph Byrd, and he's the editor.

Nobody's as powerful as we make them out to be.

For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle; and one faces down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged.

There are those who believe Black people possess the secret of joy and that it is this that will sustain them through any spiritual or moral or physical devastation.

If you want to have a life that is worth living, a life that expresses your deepest feelings and emotions and cares and dreams, you have to fight for it.

You know how big love is? Love is big. love can hold anger; love can even hold hatred.

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.

Life is abundant, and life is beautiful. And it's a good place that we're all in, you know, on this earth, if we take care of it.

I can be almost terminally grief-stricken because things are so dire, but at the same time, there's a real lightheartedness about just the recoverability of life, of how things change, how they're not the same, ever again.

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.

There are thousands of Palestinians in prison virtually for no reason.

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.

It no longer bothers me that I may be constantly searching for father figures; by this time, I have found several and dearly enjoyed knowing them all.

Propaganda is amazing people can be led to believe anything.

I'm sure we, the American people, are the butt of jokes by those in power.

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.

I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to.

I think writing really helps you heal yourself. I think if you write long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write, as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.

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.

We should not look down on our first ancestors.

I just like to have words that describe things correctly. Now to me, 'black feminist' does not do that. I need a word that is organic, that really comes out of the culture, that really expresses the spirit that we see in black women. And it's just... womanish.

I made my first white women friends in college; they loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered.

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

I love the women's movement, and I never thought of it as belonging to any particular segment of the population.

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.

I never talk about my next project.

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.