Alice Walker
You don't always have to be doing something. You can just be, and that's plenty.
Is solace anywhere more comforting than that in the arms of a sister.
Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.
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.
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.
There's an ecstatic side to writing. It's like jazz. It just has a life.
The most important question in the world is, 'Why is the child crying?'
Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.
People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.
The fact is that when you do something from your heart, you leave a heart print.
Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week.
I try to teach my heart not to want things it can't have.
We must, I believe, start teaching our children the sanity of nonviolence much earlier.
What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears.
I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.
I grew up in the South under segregation. So, I know what terrorism feels like - when your father could be taken out in the middle of the night and lynched just because he didn't look like he was in an obeying frame of mind when a white person said something he must do. I mean, that's terrorism, too.
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.
I'm not lesbian; I'm not bisexual; I'm not straight. I'm just curious.
I think America has always been polarized.
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.
Even with all of the things that are so awful, if you walk into your yard and stay there looking at almost anything for five minutes, you will be stunned by how marvelous life is and how incredibly lucky we are to have it.
When I was 18, I went to the Soviet Union. I kept hearing that America was planning to bomb them - lots of bombs were going to come down on these people. I went there not knowing anything, except that I thought the whole thing was stupid and that I wanted to see who these people were that we were going to bomb.
Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me.
I'm the most stubborn person I know.
On a spiritual level, it's as though with my sighted eye I see what's before me, and with my unsighted eye I see what's hidden. It's illuminated life more than darkened it.
As you know from school, it's when you have not prepared for the test that you have the fear of failing. And if you have prepared, even if you fail, you've done your best.
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?
Since the time of the witch burnings, the grandmothers and the healers and the midwives have been systematically targeted. And burned at the stake for hundreds of years, decimating whole communities.
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.
I think 'The Color Purple' is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the need for connection around the globe.
It's a tragedy, in a way, that Americans are brought up to think that they cannot feel for other people and other beings just because they are different. They think they're different. It's very limiting.
I want the Israeli government to be made accountable for its behaviour to the Palestinians, and I want the people of the U.S. to cease acting as if they don't understand what is going on.
I think war is so incredibly backward, and I don't think it's intelligent, and it's not sane. So why would you want to support it?
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.
One child must never be set above another, even in casual conversation, not to mention in speeches that circle the globe.
The quietly pacifist peaceful always die to make room for men who shout.
Israel is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people, both inside Israel and also in the Occupied Territories.
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.
I live a very secluded life, a very contemplative life and a very meditative one. That is my ideal life.
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.
I'm still living at least five parallel lives, honestly! I wonder about it. I have no idea how that happens.
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 was distressed that after 9/11, when the United States was attacked by terrorists, the United States' response was to attack Afghanistan, where some of the terrorists had been.
My family was a poor farming family, and we lived under absolute segregation.
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.
I think the foundation of everything in my life is wonder.
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 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.
We must, all of us, learn actually not to have enemies, but only confused adversaries who are ourselves in disguise.