Alice Walker's 150 Best Quotes: A Journey of Wisdom, Love, and Courage
Alice Walker, an esteemed author, poet, and activist, has left an indelible mark on the literary world with her powerful words and unwavering advocacy for social justice. Best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Color Purple, Walker's works explore themes of race, gender, and identity, resonating with readers worldwide. Her quotes, imbued with wisdom and compassion, continue to inspire and challenge us to reflect on our lives and the world around us. In this article, we delve into 150 of Alice Walker's most profound quotes, organized thematically to capture the essence of her enduring legacy.
Table of Contents
1. Wisdom
Alice Walker's insights into life and human nature offer a treasure trove of wisdom. Her quotes encourage us to seek deeper understanding and embrace the complexities of existence.
"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
"What is always needed in the appreciation of art, or life, is the larger perspective. Connections made, or at least attempted, where none existed before..." - Alice Walker
"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any." - Alice Walker
"Expect nothing. Live frugally On surprise." - Alice Walker
"Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence." - Alice Walker
"I think humanity has forgotten – this planet is for joy." - Alice Walker
"If you're silent for a long time, people just arrive in your mind." - Alice Walker
"Some realities drive us to our knees..." - Alice Walker
"The grace with which we embrace life, in spite of the pain, the sorrows, is always a measure of what has gone before." - Alice Walker
"Peace": the fruit of justice done especially to the Self." - 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
"I've found, in my own writing, that a little hatred, keenly directed, is a useful thing." - Alice Walker
"Time moves slowly, but passes quickly." - Alice Walker
"The infinite faith I have in people's ability to understand anything that makes sense has always been justified, finally, by their behavior." - Alice Walker
"The creative mind is not a mind full of stuff." - Alice Walker
2. Love
Walker's exploration of love is both profound and poignant, emphasizing its transformative power and the deep connections it fosters.
"Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance and holler, just trying to be loved." - Alice Walker
"If she come, I be happy. If she don't, I be content. And then I figure this the lesson I was suppose to learn." - Alice Walker
"I've learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart." - Alice Walker
"My heart hurt so much I can't believe it. How can it keep beating, feeling like this? But I'm a woman. I love you, I say. Whatever happen, whatever you do, I love you." - Alice Walker
"Listen, God love everything you love - and a mess of stuff you don't." - Alice Walker
"Even as I hold you, I am letting you go." - Alice Walker
"The only way to solace anyone who loved you in life is to be a good memory." - Alice Walker
"To acknowledge our ancestors means we are aware that we did not make ourselves..." - 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
"When I no longer have your heart I will not request your body your presence or even your polite conversation." - Alice Walker
"Here us is, I thought, two old fools left over from love, keeping each other company under the stars." - Alice Walker
"You telling me I won't even be able to love my own say, say Miss Eleanor Jane. No, say Sofia. That's not what I'm telling you." - Alice Walker
"He say to tell the truth, Shug act more manly than most men. I mean she upright, honest." - Alice Walker
"Once us feel loved by God, us do the best us can to please him with what us like." - 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
3. Courage
In the face of adversity, Walker's words inspire us to find our inner strength and courage, challenging us to persevere and fight for what is right.
"My friend says to me: But what can we do? Already giving up. To be aware is already something, I say." - Alice Walker
"And I don't believe you dead. How can you be dead if I still feel you?" - Alice Walker
"I am telling you Discouraged One we will win. And I will show you why." - Alice Walker
"She standing there looking me straight in the eye. She look tired and her jaws full of air." - Alice Walker
"Hope is a woman who has lost her fear." - Alice Walker
"Resistance is the secret of joy!" - Alice Walker
"We must begin seeing other creatures as equal. Existence makes us all equal." - Alice Walker
"There is for human beings no greater hell to fear than the one on earth." - Alice Walker
"But cheer up. Who could have imagined What the world is really like When we were children?" - Alice Walker
"You think you can avoid pain, but you actually can't. If you do, you just get sicker, or you feel more pain." - Alice Walker
"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." - Alice Walker
"We are a people. A people do not throw their geniuses away." - Alice Walker
"Try not to hold her fears against her. At the end she understood, and believed. And forgave-whatever there was to forgive." - 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
"Healing cannot be done by settling a score." - Alice Walker
4. Growth
Walker's reflections on personal growth encourage us to embrace change and transformation, emphasizing the importance of self-discovery and resilience.
"What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears." - Alice Walker
"How do we make new and restorative of soul the old pain?" - Alice Walker
"There is a way forward and yes it is with a broken heart but it is our own way collectively convened, pondered, shared." - Alice Walker
"In our despair that justice is slow we sit with heads bowed wondering how even whether we will ever be healed." - Alice Walker
"We will never regret having been born in this cruel time for we recognize it for what it is: the time of fullness of heart." - Alice Walker
"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
"Every small positive change we make in ourselves repays us in confidence in the future." - Alice Walker
"I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask." - Alice Walker
"It didn't take long to realize I didn't hardly know nothing." - Alice Walker
"She say, My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people." - Alice Walker
"Dear Nettie, I don't write to God no more, I write to you." - Alice Walker
"Activism pays the rent on being alive and being here on the planet." - 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
"The long-term accommodation that protects marriage and other such relationships is ... forgetfulness." - Alice Walker
"Now we are beginning to ask the crucial question." - Alice Walker
5. Hope
Alice Walker's words of hope remind us to remain optimistic and resilient, even in the face of adversity, and to believe in the possibility of a better future.
"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." - Alice Walker
"Hope is a woman who has lost her fear." - Alice Walker
"Hope to sin only in the service of waking up." - Alice Walker
"Some realities drive us to our knees and since I was there already before my altar I unwrapped and lit the beeswax candles I acquired for you." - Alice Walker
"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
"We have to wake up. We have to refuse to be a clone." - Alice Walker
"Here us is, I thought, two old fools left over from love, keeping each other company under the stars." - Alice Walker
"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." - Alice Walker
"I can be almost terminally grief-stricken because things are so dire, but at the same, there's a real lightheartedness about just the recoverability of life, of how things change, how they're not the same, ever again." - Alice Walker
"The world was almost at the point of forgetting what a fine time people can have helping one another." - Alice Walker
"Hard times require furious dancing. Each of us is proof." - Alice Walker
"The more I wonder, the more I love." - Alice Walker
"Dear God...I have always been a good girl. Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me." - Alice Walker
"It's better to have your blackness taken away than to stand there and lie about who you actually are." - Alice Walker
"Para mí es un misterio que a una mujer tenga que importarle ni un comino lo que la gente pueda pensar de ella." - Alice Walker
6. Success
Walker redefines success by emphasizing authenticity, resilience, and the pursuit of one's true passions.
"You'd be surprised how good writing matters when you're going after money." - Alice Walker
"The animals of the world exist for their own reasons." - Alice Walker
"How anyone cannot see that Nature is God is amazing to me: that they'd rather worship something that can only exist, really, in their own minds." - Alice Walker
"I feel that all you can do is give it your absolute best with whatever gifts the universe has given you." - Alice Walker
"Freedom, after all, is like love: the more you give to others, the more you have." - Alice Walker
"My work is about my life, and what I want to do with it." - Alice Walker
"It must become a right of every person to die of old age. And if we secure this right for ourselves, we can, coincidentally, assure it for the planet." - Alice Walker
"Only dead people need loud music, you know." - Alice Walker
"The fact is that when you do something from your heart, you leave a heart print." - Alice Walker
"The infinite faith I have in people's ability to understand anything that makes sense has always been justified, finally, by their behavior." - Alice Walker
"The world rising can put an end to anything: the murder of children whales elephants oceans." - Alice Walker
"Be what they do not want: Be thoughtful. Be skilled at loving. Be of good heart. Be of the world tribe." - Alice Walker
"You don't really stay attached to things. Life goes on, so you don't really sit around and think about how they are relevant to other people." - Alice Walker
"In an oppressive society it may well be that all fantasies indulged in by the oppressor are destructive to the oppressed." - Alice Walker
"What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers' time?" - Alice Walker
7. Life Lessons
Walker's reflections on life and its myriad lessons offer guidance and introspection, encouraging us to navigate our journeys with grace and understanding.
"Then he say something that really surprise me cause it so thoughtful and common sense." - Alice Walker
"If I could be the mother of Wind I would blow all fear away from you." - Alice Walker
"She got a long pointed nose and big fleshy mouth. Lips look like black plum. Eyes big, glossy." - Alice Walker
"Folks crying and fanning and trying to keep a stray eye on the children, but they don't stare at Sofia and her sisters." - Alice Walker
"The life of my people is to remember forever; each head granary is full." - Alice Walker
"The three wealthiest people in the world own more than the GDP of forty-eight countries!" - Alice Walker
"A foot. Remember how DuBois saw those human feet in a butcher's window in downtown Atlanta?" - Alice Walker
"Madame, he said, when Aunt Theodosia finished her story and flashed her famous medal around the room, do you realize King Leopold cut the hands off workers who, in the opinion of his plantation overseers did not fulfill their rubber quota?" - Alice Walker
"If you know your heart sorry, I say, that mean it not quite as spoilt as you think." - Alice Walker
"Surely the earth can be saved by all the people who insist on love." - Alice Walker
"All History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world." - Alice Walker
"I've found, in my own writing, that a little hatred, keenly directed, is a useful thing." - Alice Walker
"The real revolution is always concerned with the least glamorous stuff." - Alice Walker
"We do it because we care. We care that Vincent Van Gogh mutilated his ear." - Alice Walker
"The world is changing. It is no longer a world just for boys and men." - Alice Walker
8. Justice and Activism
Alice Walker's unwavering commitment to justice and activism shines through her words, urging us to confront inequality and strive for a more equitable world.
"How peculiar it feels to speak about health care in America taking care of people’s health while our government bombs the limbs off children in faraway lands." - Alice Walker
"Why should the killers of the world be 'the future' and not us?" - Alice Walker
"We were not meant to suffer so much and learn nothing." - Alice Walker
"The animals of the planet are in desperate peril... Without free animal life I believe we will lose the spiritual equivalent of oxygen." - Alice Walker
"And when they spy on us let them discover us loving." - Alice Walker
"Animals can communicate quite well. And they do. And generally speaking, they are ignored." - Alice Walker
"Politically, the world is so confused right now - there's so much suffering caused by various movements by various parties and people in power in government." - Alice Walker
"He beat me when you not here, I say. Who do, she say, Albert? Mr ____, I say. I can't believe it, she say." - Alice Walker
"Activism pays the rent on being alive and being here on the planet." - Alice Walker
"Artists have a responsibility to speak and to act when governments fail, and if we don't do that, we really deserve the world we get." - Alice Walker
"The harm that you do to others is the harm that you do to yourself." - Alice Walker
"Resistance is the secret of joy!" - Alice Walker
"Human compassion is equal to human cruelty, and it is up to each of us to tip the balance." - Alice Walker
"We must begin seeing other creatures as equal. Existence makes us all equal." - Alice Walker
"It has been proved that the land can exist without the country - and be better for it; it has not been proved that the country can live without the land." - Alice Walker
Conclusion
Alice Walker's words resonate with a timeless wisdom that transcends generations. Her quotes challenge us to reflect deeply on our lives, confront injustices, and embrace the transformative power of love and courage. Through her profound insights, Walker has left an enduring legacy that continues to inspire and empower individuals worldwide. As we navigate the complexities of life, her words remain a beacon of hope, reminding us that, even in the face of adversity, we have the strength to create change and build a more just and compassionate world.
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