Alice Walker
You know how big love is? Love is big. love can hold anger; love can even hold hatred.Collection: Anger
I have such respect for 'Democracy Now!'Collection: Respect
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.Collection: Government
In search of my mother's garden, I found my own.Collection: Gardening
Never be the only one, except, possibly, in your own home.Collection: Home
The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate.Collection: Experience
When I joined the freedom movement in Mississippi in my early 20s, it was to come to the aid of sharecroppers, like my parents, who had been thrown off the land they'd always known - the plantations - because they attempted to exercise their 'democratic' right to vote.Collection: Freedom
For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn't poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.Collection: Poetry
In South Korea, they believe that when you turn 60, you've become a baby again and the rest of your life should be totally about joy and happiness, and people should leave you alone, and I just think that that's the height of intelligence.Collection: Happiness
Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.Collection: Death
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.Collection: Future
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.Collection: Good
Women have to summon up courage to fulfill dormant dreams.Collection: Dreams
The infinite faith I have in people's ability to understand anything that makes sense has always been justified, finally, by their behavior.Collection: Faith
Propaganda is amazing. People can be led to believe anything.Collection: Amazing
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.Collection: Women
Clearly older women and especially older women who have led an active life or elder women who successfully maneuver through their own family life have so much to teach us about sharing, patience, and wisdom.Collection: Wisdom
Howard Zinn was magical as a teacher. Witty, irreverent, and wise, he loved what he was teaching and clearly wanted his students to love it, also.Collection: Teacher
'Thank you' is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.Collection: Thankful
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.Collection: Dreams
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.Collection: Fear
Don't wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you've got to make yourself.Collection: Happiness
We must do everything in our power to cease the behaviour that makes children everywhere feel afraid.Collection: Power
Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.Collection: Power
In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they're still beautiful.Collection: Nature
One of the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement is that when you travel through the South today, you do not feel overwhelmed by a residue of grievance and hate.Collection: Travel
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.Collection: Money
The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one's people that has not previously been taken into account.Collection: Society
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.Collection: Relationship
Creation is a sustained period of bliss, even though the subject can still be very sad. Because there's the triumph of coming through and understanding that you have, and that you did it the way only you could do it. You didn't do it the way somebody told you to do it.Collection: Sad
Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.Collection: Poetry
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.Collection: Change
Fear is real, but so is love.Collection: Fear
I understood at a very early age that in nature, I felt everything I should feel in church but never did. Walking in the woods, I felt in touch with the universe and with the spirit of the universe.Collection: Age
I'm not convinced that women have the education or the sense of their own history enough or that they understand the cruelty of which men are capable and the delight that many men will take in seeing you choose to chain yourself - then they get to say 'See, you did it yourself.'Collection: Education
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.Collection: Power
I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.Collection: Love
No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.Collection: Friendship
Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.Collection: Mom
How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.Collection: Mom
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.Collection: Women
I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.Collection: Nature
I don't call myself a Buddhist. I'm a free spirit. I believe I'm here on earth to admire and enjoy it; that's my religion.Collection: Religion
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.Collection: Friendship
If we want to fight people in the world, we should fight them with pillows - pillows stuffed with food, medicine, music... That would be so much cheaper than bombs.Collection: Food
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.Collection: Future
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.Collection: Respect
This is a wonderful planet, and it is being completely destroyed by people who have too much money and power and no empathy.Collection: Money
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.Collection: Freedom
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.Collection: Women