Alice Walker Quotes

196 Sourced Quotes

My great-great-great-grandmother walked as a slave from Virginia to Eatonton, Georgia... It is in memory of this walk that I chose to keep and to embrace my "maiden" name, Walker.

Alice Walker
We will be ourselves and free, or die in the attempt. Harriet Tubman was not our great-grandmother for nothing.

Alice Walker
'Progress' affects few. Only revolution can affect many.

Alice Walker
The animals of the planet are in desperate peril.... Without free animal life I believe we will lose the spiritual equivalent of oxygen.

Alice Walker
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.

Alice Walker
Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.

Alice Walker
What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears.

Alice Walker
I know, in my soul, that to eat a creature who is raised to be eaten, and who never has a chance to be a real being, is unhealthy. It's like...you're just eating misery. You're eating a bitter life.

Alice Walker
How anyone cannot see that Nature is God is amazing to me: that they'd rather worship something that can only exist, really, in their own minds.

Alice Walker
I think Africans are very much like white people back home, in that they think they are the center of the universe and that everything that is done is done for them.

Alice Walker
We know a roofleaf is not Jesus Christ, but in its own humble way, is it not God?

Alice Walker
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.

Alice Walker
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. So much of what passes for teaching is merely a pointing out of what items to want.

Alice Walker
A writer's heart, a poet's heart, an artist's heart, a musician's heart is always breaking. It is through that broken window that we see the world; more mysterious, beloved, insane, and precious for the sparkling and jagged edges of the smaller enclosure we have escaped.

Alice Walker
They circumcised women, little girls, in Jesus's time. Did he know? Did the subject anger or embarrass him? Did the early church erase the record? Jesus himself was circumcised; perhaps he thought only the cutting done to him was done to women, and therefore, since he survived, it was all right.

Alice Walker
The world is changing, I said. It is no longer a world just for boys and men.

Alice Walker
He has told me he likes men as well as he likes women, which seems only natural, he says, since he is the offspring of two sexes as well as two races. No one is surprised he is biracial; why should they be surprised he is bisexual? This is an explanation I have never heard and cannot entirely grasp; it seems too logical for my brain.

Alice Walker
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.

Alice Walker
The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn't want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give 'em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass.

Alice Walker
Human animals and nonhuman animals can communicate quite well; if we are brought up around animals as children we take this for granted. By the time we are adults we no longer remember.

Alice Walker
The sight of a Black nun strikes their sentimentality; and, as I am unalterably rooted in native ground, they consider me a work of primitive art, housed in a magical color; the incarnation of civilized, anti-heathenism, and the fruit of a triumphing idea.

Alice Walker
I'm the kind of woman that likes to enjoy herselves in peace.

Alice Walker
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.

Alice Walker
I want a grown-up attitude to Cuba, for instance, a country and people I love. I want an end to the war immediately, and I want the soldiers to be encouraged to destroy their weapons and drive themselves out of Iraq. I want the Israeli government to be made accountable for its behaviour to the Palestinians, and I want the people of the US to cease acting as if they don't understand what is going on. But most of all I want someone with the confidence to talk to anyone, "enemy" or "friend", and this Obama has shown he can do.

Alice Walker
To acknowledge our ancestors means we are aware that we did not make ourselves, that the line stretches all the way back, perhaps to God; or to Gods. We remember them because it is an easy thing to forget: that we are not the first to suffer, rebel, fight, love and die. The grace with which we embrace life, in spite of the pain, the sorrow, is always a measure of what has gone before.

Alice Walker
The long-term accommodation that protects marriage and other such relationships is... forgetfulness.

Alice Walker
Somewhere in the bible it say Jesus' hair was like lamb's wool, I say. Well, say Shug, if he came to any of these churches we talking bout he'd have to have it conked before anybody paid him any attention. The last thing niggers want to think about they God is that his hair kinky.

Alice Walker
War will stop when we no longer praise it, or give it any attention at all. Peace will come wherever it is sincerely invited.

Alice Walker
You must run around like a crazy person or walk sedately honoring the dead.

Alice Walker
Oh, Celie, unbelief is a terrible thing. And so is the hurt we cause others unknowingly.

Alice Walker