Who is Alice Walker
Alice Malsenior Tallulah-Kate Walker (born February 9, 1944) is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, and social activist. In 1982, she wrote the novel The Color Purple, for which she won the National Book Award for hardcover fiction, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She also wrote the novels Meridian (1976) and The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970). An avowed feminist, Walker coined the term womanist to mean “A black feminist or feminist of color” in 1983.
Alice Malsenior Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, a rural farming town, to Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Tallulah Grant. Both of Walker’s parents were sharecroppers, though her mother also worked as a seamstress to earn extra money. Walker, the youngest of eight children, was first enrolled in school when she was just four years old at East Putnam Consolidated.
Alice Walker Quotes
1. No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.
2. The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.
3. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.
4. Hard times require furious dancing. Each of us is proof.
5. 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
6. 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
7. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. 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
8. 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.
9. 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
10. What the mind doesn’t understand, it worships or fears
11. Time moves slowly, but passes quickly
12. Activism is my rent for living on the planet
13. Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance and holler, just trying to be loved
14. Even as I hold you, I am letting you go.
15. Here’s the thing, say Shug. The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don’t know what you looking for. Trouble do it for most folks, I think. Sorrow, lord. Feeling like shit. It? I ask. Yeah, It. God ain’t a he or a she, but a It. But what do it look like? I ask. Don’t look like nothing, she say. It ain’t a picture show. It ain’t something you can look at apart from anything else, including yourself. I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you cam feel that, and be happy to feel that, you’ve found it
16. Men make war to get attention. All killing is an expression of self-hate
17. All my life I had to fight. I had to fight my daddy. I had to fight my brothers. I had to fight my cousins and my uncles. A girl child ain’t safe in a family of men. But I never thought I’d have to fight in my own house. She let out her breath. I loves Harpo, she say. God knows I do. But I’ll kill him dead before I let him beat me.
18. Look closely at the present you are constructing:
it should look like the future you are dreaming
19. I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.
20. In nature, nothing is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways and they’re still beautiful.
21. Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.
22. Any God I ever found in church, I brought in myself.
23. 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.
24. Horses make a landscape look beautiful.
25. I’m mad about the waste that happens when people who love each other can’t even bring themselves to talk.
26. In search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.
27. Oh, Celie, unbelief is a terrible thing. And so is the hurt we cause others unknowingly.
28. A grown child is a dangerous thing.
29. Man corrupt everything, say Shug. He on your box of grits, in your head, and all over the radio. He try to make you think he everywhere. Soon as you think he everywhere, you think he God. But he ain’t. Whenever you trying to pray, and man plop himself on the other end of it, tell him to git lost, say Shug. Conjure up the flowers, wind, water, a big rock.
30. The nature of this flower is to bloom.
31. The more I wonder, the more I love.
32. Everything want to be loved.
33. 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?
34. 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.
35. Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.
36. People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.
37. I’m pore, I’m black, I may be ugly and can’t cook, a voice say to everything listening. But I’m here.
38. 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.
39. Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors.
40. When the ax came into the forest the trees said the handle is one of us.
41. Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to get attention we do, except walk?
42. The Olinka girls do not believe girls should be educated. When I asked a mother why she thought this, she said: A girl is nothing to herself; only to her husband can she become something.
What can she become? I asked.
Why, she said, the mother of his children.
But I am not the mother of anybody’s children, I said, and I am something.
43. Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.
44. She thought of how precious it was to be able to know another person over many years. There was incomparable richness in it.
45. I have fought and kicked and fasted and prayed and cursed and cried myself to the point of existing.
46. Why any woman give a shit what people think is a mystery to me.
47. You must learn to love only that which cannot be stolen.
48. Animals can communicate quite well. And they do. And generally speaking, they are ignored
49. Every time I conjure up a rock, I throw it.
50. I don’t know. I imagine good teaching as a circle of earnest people sitting down to ask each other meaningful questions. I don’t see it as a handing down of answers.
51. The world is changing. It is no longer a world just for boys and men
52. It is this broken road with pitfalls and sharp turns and unexpected traverses that has brought me joy and adventure.
53. Here’s the thing, say Shug. The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And some-times it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don’t know what you looking for l. Trouble do it for most folks, I think. Sorrow, Lord. Feeling like shit.
54. What will people say, you running off to Memphis like you don’t have a house to look after?
Shug say, Albert. Try to think like you got some sense. Why any woman give a shit what people think is a mystery to me.
Well, say Grady, trying to bring light. A woman can’t git a man if peoples talk.
Shug look at me and us giggle. Then us sure nuff. Then Squeak start to laugh. Then Sofia. All us laugh and laugh.
55. I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you’ve found It.
56. 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.
57. God is different to us now, after all these years in Africa. More spirit than ever before, and more internal. Most people think he has to look like something or someone- a roofleaf or Christ- but we don’t. And not being tied to what God looks like, frees us.
58. We do not believe in heaven or hell…; we do not believe in eternal damnation. We believe only in the unavoidable horror of hurting others and of likewise being hurt.
59. 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.
60. 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.
