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The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn't want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass.

Alice Walker
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I try to teach my heart not to want things it can't have.
Alice Walker
The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one's people that has not previously been taken into account.
Alice Walker
Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors.
Alice Walker
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.
Alice Walker
Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.
Alice Walker
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.
Alice Walker
Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.
Alice Walker
Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.
Alice Walker
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
No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.
Alice Walker
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.
Alice Walker
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.
Alice Walker
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.
Alice Walker
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.
Alice Walker
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.
Alice Walker
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.
Alice Walker
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.
Alice Walker
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.
Alice Walker
The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn't want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass.
Alice Walker
Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?
Alice Walker
Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.
Alice Walker
People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.
Alice Walker
In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they're still beautiful.
Alice Walker
The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate.
Alice Walker
To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.
Alice Walker
Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me.
Alice Walker
I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.
Alice Walker
The most important question in the world is, 'Why is the child crying?'
Alice Walker
Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week.
Alice Walker
The quietly pacifist peaceful always die to make room for men who shout.
Alice Walker
In search of my mother's garden, I found my own.
Alice Walker
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.
Alice Walker
How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.
Alice Walker
Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.
Alice Walker
Horses make a landscape look beautiful.
Alice Walker
Don't wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you've got to make yourself.
Alice Walker
Helped are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception and realize a partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful.
Alice Walker
Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.
Alice Walker
What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears.
Alice Walker
All History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world.
Alice Walker
I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.
Alice Walker
Is solace anywhere more comforting than that in the arms of a sister.
Alice Walker
Never be the only one, except, possibly, in your own home.
Alice Walker
'Fame' exhausts me.
Alice Walker
'Thank you' is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.
Alice Walker
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.
Alice Walker
A people do not throw their geniuses away. And if they are thrown away, it is our duty as artists and as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children and, if necessary, bone by bone.
Alice Walker
America is not nearly done. We're only in the beginning. Who knows who we will be? Who knows... what color we will be? It is all something that, maybe, our descendants - if they survive that long - will see.
Alice Walker