Alice Walker is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, and social activist. Profoundly inspirational Alice Walker quotes will challenge the way you think, change the way you live and transform your whole life.
If you’re searching for motivational quotes by authors that perfectly capture what you’d like to say or just want to feel inspired yourself, browse through an amazing collection of quotes from Anais Nin, powerful Anne Lamott quotes and famous Audre Lorde quotes.
Famous Alice Walker Quotes
Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.
Look closely at the present you are constructing: it should look like the future you are dreaming.
The more I wonder, the more I love.
Time moves quickly but passes quickly.
‘Thank you’ is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.
Don’t wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you’ve got to make yourself.
I’m always amazed that people will actually choose to sit in front of the television and just be savaged by stuff that belittles their intelligence.
We do it because we care. We care that Vincent Van Gogh mutilated his ear. We care that behind a pile of manure in the yard he destroyed his life. We care that Scott Joplin’s music lives! We care because we know this: the life we save is our own.
People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.
He recognized her immediately when he saw her again. And what he recognized was her energy, which seemed to precede her. As if her spirit were thrusting itself forward, into the unknown; dazzled, charmed, challenged, hopeful, happy to be energized by the mysterious, loving the adrenaline rush of surprise.
I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering bout the big things and asking bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, the more I love.
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.
It just seems clear to me that as long as we are all here, it’s pretty clear that the struggle is to share the planet, rather than divide it.
there was no sympathy for struggle that ended in defeat. Which meant there was no sympathy for struggle itself—only for winning.
If you lie to yourself about your own pain, you will be killed by those who will claim you enjoyed it.
No person is your friend who demands your silence or denies your right to grow.
Too much respect for people who are not respectful to you is a sure sign of insecurity.
I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.
Laughter isn’t even the other side of tears. It is tears turned inside out. Truly the suffering is great, here on earth. We blunder along, shredded by our mistakes, bludgeoned by our faults. Not having a clue where the dark path leads us. But on the whole, we stumble along bravely, don’t you think?
As long as the Earth can make a spring every year, I can. As long as the Earth can flower and produce nurturing fruit, I can, because I’m the Earth. I won’t give up until the Earth gives up.
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.
Inspirational Alice Walker Quotes
What the mind doesn’t understand, it worships or fears.
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.
In search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.
We sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to get the attention we do, except walk?
Hard times require furious dancing. Each of us is proof.
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.
In nature, nothing is perfect, and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.
We are a people. 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.
Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.
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.
Every time I conjure up a rock, I throw it.
Expect nothing, live frugally on surprise.
It seems our fate is to be incorrect … and in our incorrectness stand.
The quietly pacifist peaceful always die to make room for men who shout.
I’m pore, I’m black, I may be ugly and can’t cook, a voice say to everything listening. But I’m here.
It no longer bothers me that I may constantly be searching for father figures; by this time, I have found several and dearly enjoyed knowing them all.
Writing poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before.
Being happy is not the only happiness.
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.
War contributes greatly to global warming, which shouldn’t surprise us. All those bombs going off, all those rockets, all those planes, and helicopters. All that fuel of various kinds being used. It pollutes the air and water of this very fragile and interconnected planet.
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.
The nature of this flower is to bloom.
Never be the only one, except, possibly, in your own home.
Helped are those who are content to be themselves; they will never lack mystery in their lives and the joys of self-discovery will be constant.
Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.
This is a wonderful planet, and it is being completely destroyed by people who have too much money and power and no empathy.
Everything wants to be loved. Us sing and dance and holler, just trying to be loved.
Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.
Amazing Alice Walker Quotes
I have learned not to worry about love, but to honor it’s coming with all my heart.
A grown child is a dangerous thing.
Keep in mind always the present you are constructing. It should be the future you want.
Without money of one’s own in a capitalist society, there is no such thing as independence.
And I don’t believe you dead. How can you be dead if I still feel you? Maybe, like God, you changed into something different that I’ll have to speak to differently, but you not dead to me Nettie. And never will you be.
People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.
All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.
The longer I am a writer–so long now that my writing finger is periodically numb–the better I understand what writing is; what its function is; what it is supposed to do. I learn that the writer’s pen is a microphone held up to the mouths of ancestors and even stones of long ago. That once given permission by the writer–a fool, and so why should one fear?–horses, dogs, rivers, and, yes, chickens can step forward and expound on their lives. The magic of this is not so much in the power of the microphone as in the ability of the nonhuman object or animal to BE and the human animal to PERCEIVE ITS BEING.
Men make war to get attention. All killing is an expression of self-hate.
Activism is my rent for living on the planet
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.
Ignorance, arrogance, and racism have bloomed as Superior Knowledge in all too many universities.
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.
I am an expression of the divine, just like a peach is, just like a fish is. I have a right to be this way…I can’t apologize for that, nor can I change it, nor do I want to… We will never have to be other than who we are in order to be successful…We realize that we are as ourselves unlimited and our experiences valid. It is for the rest of the world to recognize this, if they choose.
How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mother’s names.
…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.
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.
I have the uncanny feeling that, just at the end of my life, I am beginning to reinhabit completely the body I long ago left.
All History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world.
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.
It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one’s children will become than for the children one’s mature critics often are.
