Alice Walker
Listen, God love everything you love - and a mess of stuff you don't. But more than anything else, God love admiration. You saying God vain? I ast. Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it. What it do when it pissed off? I ast. Oh, it make something else. People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.Collection: Thinking
I feel that the ancestors are that covering that will cover me. I feel like I can only be enveloped in them spiritually and physically.Collection: Covering
I feel a little peculiar around the children. For one thing, they grown. And I see they think me and Nettie and Shug and Albert and Samuel and Harpo and Sofia and Jack and Odessa real old and don't know much what going on. But I don't think us feel old at all. And us so happy. Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt.Collection: Children
I don't know nothing, I think. And glad of it.Collection: Knowledge
I'm pore, I'm black, I may be ugly and can't cook, a voice say to everything listening. But I'm here.Collection: Voice
One thing that never ceases to amaze me, along with the growth of vegetation from the earth and of hair from the head, is the growth of understanding.Collection: Wisdom
Like I said...fine with me.Collection: Said
Odinary people don't have a feeling of being loved by the people who manage to get into positions of leadership. They get in there, they make a lot of money, and then they play games with us.Collection: People
This life soon be over, I say. Heaven last all ways.Collection: Heaven
I feel I am a child that's lost its mother. I feel like a calf whose mother has gone off to slaughter.Collection: Mother
I know what I'm thinking bout, I think. Nothing. And as much of it as I can.Collection: Thinking
It's better to have your blackness taken away than to stand and lie about who you actually are.Collection: Lying
Writing poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before.Collection: Suicide
Just because I don't harass it like some peoples us know don't mean I ain't got religion.Collection: Mean
Honestly, that is the most important thing to me: Can I continue to live up to my own expectations of myself - and not fall back into slacking?Collection: Fall
Whoever you are, whatever you are, start with that, whether salt of the earth or only white sugar.Collection: Change
But if by some miracle and all our struggle, the earth is spared, only justice to every living being will save humankind.Collection: Struggle
That is scary, when you consider what we're doing to children all over the planet. They're the ones who are truly being terrorized by all the madness adults are perpetrating.Collection: Children
Aside from the fact that they say it's unhealthy, my fat ain't never been no trouble. Mens always have loved me. My kids ain't never complained. Plus they's fat.Collection: Kids
I love my own culture. I love my African-American culture very deeply, and I know it deserves to be honored. You have to be aware that people are suffering unjustly, and given our own history we have a duty to stand for the people who are being treated like our parents and grandparents and children were treated.Collection: Children
People will say to you, "Oh, you are fearless." That is so not true. We should stop saying that about people. It's a slander, really.Collection: People
Howard Zinn helped us desegregate Atlanta. That was moving because he took a lot of abuse for that. He and Staughton Lynd, a fellow professor who was also from the North, stood with us. They were certainly behind us. In fact, they often stood in front of us. This had a huge impact on me. But one of the reasons I was very careful about speaking about the relationship I had with him and Staughton was because, in a racist society, if you acknowledge a deep love for and a deep debt owed to white teachers, they tend to discredit your own parents and your own community.Collection: Teacher
The good news may be that Nature is phasing out the white man, but the bad news is that's who She thinks we all are.Collection: Men
Eventually I knew what hair wanted; it wanted to be itself ... to be left alone by anyone, including me, who did not love it as it was.Collection: Hair
The original crime of niggers and lesbians is that they prefer themselves.Collection: Crime
...have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.Collection: God
But it ain't easy, trying to do without God even if you know he ain't there, trying to do without him is a strainCollection: Trying
Critics don't really affect the fact that we live in this paradise and what the meaning of that [is]. And what luck to have this!Collection: Luck
Helped are those who forgive; their reward shall be forgetfulness of every evil done to them. It will be in their power, therefore, to envision the new Earth. -----“The Gospel According to ShugCollection: Evil
In order to be able to live at all in America I must be unafraid to live anywhere in it, and I must be able to live in the fashion and with whom I choose.Collection: Fashion
I'm where I need to be, so my heart is light. Whatever happens, I know - I mean, I feel - that this is absolutely where I should be and I've lived up to my own expectations.Collection: Heart
Be nobody's darling; Be an outcast. Take the contradictions Of your life And wrap around You like a shawl, To parry stones To keep you warm.Collection: Stones
My ancestors make up the skin of the world. That's who that is. That's what that is. That's us.Collection: Skins
I don't know if you actually get something out of writing poetry. I think poetry is an autonomous muse that decides to come and sit on your couch.Collection: Writing
I think I've actually returned to a kind of realism about how the world works. That's helpful. Because in a way, no matter who's in charge of the corporation that the United States is, the direction in which it is taken seems to be inexorable. So, you just get the job of being the front man for four or eight years. Now, most people realize that's what you are.Collection: Taken
How sad now never to see men holding hands, while everywhere one looks they are holding guns.Collection: Peace
Listen, God loves everything you love, and a mess of stuff you don't.Collection: Stuff
I think if I could not get myself off my cushion, off my couch, or away from whatever I'm eating - or drinking or partying or whatever - if I couldn't get away from that, I would have a heavy heart.Collection: Party
We're going to have to debunk the myth that Africa is a heaven for black people -- especially black women. We've been the mule of the world there and the mule of the world here.Collection: People
Some colored people so scared of whitefolks they claim to love the cotton gin.Collection: People
I loved meditation. I love it because that's where you find what your voice is. You cannot really find it easily in this culture. This culture is the noisiest culture ever, ever. I think the damage that it has done to people is in that realm of silencing them. They are overwhelmed by gadgets. They don't know what to think because they're so heavily programmed about what it is that they should want and should think.Collection: Thinking
You seem so clear about who you are. So certain that you are just right as you are, that for all your intelligence and maybe in spite of it, you never seem to need a second opinion.Collection: Needs
I think that indigenous women's wisdom is crucial. So much of the care of the Earth has come from the mothers. I think it's imperative we turn to their wisdom in how to take care of the planet.Collection: Mother
allowing freedom to others brings freedom to ourselves.Collection: Freedom
She was so quiet. So reflective. And she could erase herself, her spirit, with a swiftness that truly startled, when she knew the people around her could not respect it.Collection: People
She thought of how precious it was to be able to know another person over many years. There was incomparable richness in it.Collection: Years
The earth is for joy, and dancing is a big part of that. And you dance with nature. Nature is always dancing. If you're not harassing it and killing it and mutilating it, nature is dancing. That's what the leaves are doing when the wind blows through them. We live in a magical wonderful universe. And just spoil it while thinking we can at some point go to heaven or some other planet.Collection: Blow
It's essential that we understand that taking care of the planet will be done as we take care of ourselves. You know that you can't really make much of a difference in things until you change yourself.Collection: Spiritual
As we talked of freedom and justice one day for all, we sat down to steaks. I am eating misery, I thought, as I took the first bite. And spit it out.Collection: Justice