Alice Walker
I am not interested in being a role model, or in fulfilling the expectations of others. I know I am of most use to others and to myself by being this unique self: Nature, I have noticed, is not particularly devoted to copies, and human beings needn't be either.Collection: Unique
It is chilling to think that the same people who persecuted the wise women and men of Europe, its midwives and healers, then crossed the oceans to Africa and the Americas and tortured and enslaved, raped, impoverished, and eradicated the peaceful, Christ-like people they found. And that the blueprint from which they worked, and still work, was the Bible.Collection: Wise
no person is your friend (or kin) who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow and be perceived as fully blossomed as you were intended. Or who belittles in any fashion the gifts you labor so to bring into the world.Collection: Friendship
Ignorance, arrogance, and racism have bloomed as Superior Knowledge in all too many universities.Collection: Education
I try to teach my heart not to want things it cant have.Collection: Heart
the world has changed: it did not change without your prayers without your faith without your determination to believe in liberation and kindness; without your dancing through the years that had no beat.Collection: Determination
We writers - we're the snowflakes of the literary world. We each have our own shape.Collection: World
The protection of evil must be the most self-destructive job.Collection: Jobs
She say, Celie, tell the truth, have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show.Collection: Funny
... my mother adorned with flowers whatever shabby house we were forced to live in.Collection: Mother
You can't truly have an open heart until it's been broken.Collection: Heart
Just be what it is that you are, and that is just fine. You don't have to be what you're not in any way. Live that and live that fully, and that is where you discover ecstasy. You can't really have ecstasy as something other than yourselfCollection: Strong Women
Wish for nothing larger Than your own small heart.Collection: Heart
I want something else; a different system entirely. One not seen on this earth for thousands of years. If ever. Democratic Womanism. Notice how this word has "man" right in the middle of it? That's one reason I like it. He is right there, front and center. But he is surrounded. I want to vote and work for a way of life that honors the feminine.Collection: Men
Revolt is the mirror in which greed is forced to see itself.Collection: Mirrors
My God is not a religious God. My God is nature, my God is everything there is. That's God. Everything is God. I'm a child of that.Collection: Religious
One white man on the platform in South Carolina asked us where we were going--we had got off the train to get some fresh air and to dust the grit and dust out of our clothes. When we said Africa he looked offended and tickled too. Niggers going to Africa, he said to his wife. Now I have seen everything.Collection: Men
When you are active, and you must know this so well, that the more you are active, the more you see, the more you go to see. You know, you are curious. One thing leads to another thing, and it gets deeper and deeper, too. And there's no end to it.Collection: Curious
In my opinion and experience, imperialists of all nations and races will tell us anything to keep us fighting. For them.Collection: Fighting
Some people don't understand that it is the nature of the eye to have seen forever, and the nature of the mind to recall anything that was ever known.Collection: Eye
Our problem mostly in our abuse of each other and the planet is greed. Just the rampant, incredible greed that people have partly because they're empty and they can't get enough because they're - you know, it's that Buddhist thing about the hungry ghost with the little mouth and the big belly.Collection: Buddhist
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 exist without the land.Collection: Country
All my life I had to fight. I had to fight my daddy. I had to fight my uncles. I had to fight my brothers. Girl, child ain't safe in a family of men, but I ain't never thought I had to fight in my own house. I loves Harpo. God knows I do. But I'll kill him dead before I let him beat me.Collection: Girl
This could be our revolution: to love what is plentiful as much as what's scarce.Collection: Revolution
Creation is a sustained period of bliss.Collection: Bliss
Expecting anything, living frugally in surprise.Collection: Surprise
I almost never do anything for Black History Month, because I feel it's just another way to separate us.Collection: Black History
I am not lesbian, I am not bisexual, I am not straight. I am just curiousCollection: Bisexual
Curiosity is my natural state and has led me headlong into every worthwhile experience (never mind the others) I have ever had.Collection: Curiosity
The animals of the planet are in desperate peril... Without free animal life I believe we will lose the spiritual equivalent of oxygen.Collection: Spiritual
In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.Collection: Beautiful
Don’t wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you’ve got to make yourself.Collection: Being Happy
Wherever I have knocked, a door has opened. Wherever I have wandered, a path has appeared.Collection: Path
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.Collection: Book
I think America has always been polarized. It’s a racist country and it has always been.Collection: Country
I can be almost terminally grief-stricken because things are so dire, but at the same, there’s a real lightheartednes s about just the recoverability of life, of how things change, how they’re not the same, ever again.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Strong
I realized I was a country person – I’m just not used to small spaces.Collection: Country
After all, how can a society flourish, a country attain democracy and health, children grow into intelligent beings, sensitive to the needs of an ever more fragile and endangered planet, if half it’s people are kept out of the driver’s seat?Collection: Country
Love likes to extend itself. If you receive it in a book – or however you get it – then your duty is to extend it beyond.Collection: Book