Alice Walker Quotes

“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 ast.

Yeah, It. God ain't a he or a she, but a It.

But what do it look like? I ast.

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 can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you've found It.

Shug a beautiful something, let me tell you. She frown a little, look out cross the yard, lean back in her chair, look like a big rose. She say, My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate
at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed. And I laughed and I cried and I run all around the house. I knew just what it was. In fact, when it happen, you can't miss it. It sort of like you know what, she say, grinning and rubbing high up on my thigh.

Shug! I say.

Oh, she say. God love all them feelings. That's some of the best stuff God did. And when you know God loves 'em you enjoys 'em a lot more. You can just relax, go with everything that's going, and praise God by liking what you like.

God don't think it dirty? I ast.

Naw, she say. God made it. 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.

Yeah? I say.

Yeah, she say. It always making little surprises and springing them on us when us least expect.

You mean it want to be loved, just like the bible say.

Yes, Celie, she say. Everything want to be loved. 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?

Well, us talk and talk bout God, but I'm still adrift. Trying to chase that old white man out of my head. I been so busy thinking bout him I never truly notice nothing God make. Not a blade of corn (how it do that?) not the color purple (where it come from?). Not the little wildflowers. Nothing. Now that my eyes opening, I feels like a fool. Next to any little scrub of a bush in my yard, Mr. ____s evil sort of shrink. But not altogether. Still, it is like Shug say, You have to git man off your eyeball, before you can see anything a'tall.

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 flowers, wind,water, a big rock.

But this hard work, let me tell you. He been there so long, he don't want to budge. He threaten lightening, floods and earthquakes. Us fight. I hardly pray at all. Every time I conjure up a rock, I throw it.

Amen”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.”
― Alice Walker, Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology

“I think that’s what Toni Morrison and Alice Walker understand, the secret language of women. That it’s not a secret at all; men just don’t know how to listen.”
― Marlon James

“Resistance is the secret of joy!”
― Alice Walker

“All History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world.”
― Alice Walker

“Even as I hold you
I think of you as someone gone
far, far away. Your eyes the color
of pennies in a bowl of dark honey
bringing sweet light to someone else
your black hair slipping through my fingers
is the flash of your head going
around a corner
your smile, breaking before me,
the flippant last turn
of a revolving door,
emptying you out, changed,
away from me.

Even as I hold you
I am letting go.”
― Alice Walker

“Wind as old as Rome outside my window, inky fleece clouds against charcoal crushed velvet skies, fall feels soulful, like a LaBelle octave.”
― Brandi L. Bates, Soledad

“Shepherd further argues while conjuring the spirit of Alice Walker, “We need to reexamine the things we have been taught, the things we’ve been told are biblical, the terminologies we’ve had defined for us as sexual beings. We need to ‘peel the old white man from our eyeballs before we can see clearly, see ourselves and G ~ d.”
― Candi Dugas, Who Told You That You Were Naked?

“Lord, this is some thick shit Black women must get through.”
― Alice Walker, Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker

“However, the young person leaving college today, especially if she is a woman, must consider the possibility that her best offerings will be considered a nuisance to the men who also occupy her field. And then, having considered this, she would do well to make her mind to fight whoever would stifle her growth with as much courage and tenacity as Mrs. Hudson fights the Klan. If she is black and coming out into the world she must be doubly armed, doubly prepared. Because for her there is not simply a new world to be gained, there is an old world there must be reclaimed.”
― Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

“Even on those days
the news is fully bad.
And all you can do is get out of bed
and failing that
give thanks you have a bed not to get out of.”
― Alice Walker, Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart

“it is the sense
that something that was alive
for a very long time
is still alive. Not yet beaten into
submission
or oblivion
by those who kill everything
they touch
with money.”
― Alice Walker, Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart

“[Alice Walker] has been constantly showing me that poetry is everywhere around us, even in the most trivial or unnoticed things, because they all share or add something to the complex and total function and sense of life. So poems--which can be not just verses but pieces of prose and reflection as well--result from the finding of a proper, personal, and effective voice that can utter in a compelling and moving way the meaningful issues that the author finds behind ordinary and obvious phenomena.”
― Manuel Garcia Verdecia