The Temple of My Familiar Quotes

“I'm mad about the waste that happens when people who love each other can't even bring themselves to talk.”
― Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

“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.”
― Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

“What you hope for, you also fear. ”
― Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

“Resist the temptation to think what afflicts you is peculiar to you. Have faith that what is in your consciousness can be communicated to the consciousness of all. And is, in many cases, already there.”
― Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

“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.”
― Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

“Too much respect for people who are not respectful to you is a sure sign of insecurity.”
― Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

“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 Shug”
― Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

“Keep in mind always the present you are constructing. It should be the future you want.”
― Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

“The life of my people is to remember forever; each head granary is full. The life of your people is to forget: your thing granaries ("museums"), and not yourselves, are full.”
― Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

“Life is very different when you have a good friend. I've seen people without special friends, close friends. Other men, especially. For some reason men don't often make and keep friends. This is a real tragedy, I think, because in a way, without a tight male friend, you never really are able to see yourself.”
― Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

“that the reason Athena had sprung ‘full blown’ from the mind of Zeus was because she was an idea, given by Greek men to their God; and that ‘idea’ was the destruction of the African Goddess Isis and the metamorphosis of Isis into the Greek Goddess Athena.”
― Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

“She was someone who could not be rushed. This seems a small thing. But it is actually a very amazing quality, a very ancient one. She did everything at just the same pace as before, she could tell the time of day or night by the moisture in the atmosphere, and she went about her business as if she would live forever, and forever was very, very long. That is the kind of mujer my mama was. When you look at me you see her, but I have lost ‘forever’; therefore I sometimes hurry.”
― Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

“I’m mad about the waste that happens when people who love each other can’t even bring themselves to talk.”
― Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

“Perhaps this is simply the way it is with writers. It's when they don't see you that you matter. Because then you can belong to them in a way that permits them complete possession. You are determined by them. You are controlled. You are, generally speaking, exaggerated.”
― Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

“if you are from Africa you recognize Medusa’s wings as the wings of Egypt, and you recognize the head of Medusa as the head of Africa; and what you realize you are seeing is the Western world’s memorialization of that period in prehistory when the white male world of Greece decapitated and destroyed the black female Goddess/Mother tradition and culture of Africa.”
― Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

“Artists, he now understood, were simply messengers. On them fell the responsibility for uniting the world. An awesome task, but he felt up to it, in his own life. His faith must be that the pain he brought to others and to himself—so poorly concealed in the information delivered—would lead not to destruction, but to transformation”
― Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

“Our mothers taught us that in the old, old days, when they were their grandmothers and their grandmothers were old—for we are our grandmothers, you understand, only with lots of new and different things added”
― Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

“You must learn to love only that which cannot be stolen,”
― Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

“Make peace with those you love and that love you or with those you wish to love. These are your compañeros, as the latin Americans say. Above all, resist the temptation to think what afflicts you is peculiar to you. Have faith that what is in your consciousness can be communicated to the consciousness of all. And is, in many cases, already there.”
― Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

“Talk," he continued, chewing rapidly and swallowing, "is the key to liberation, one's tongue the very machete of freedom. We are the only species, some say, who have created speech. But that is only because, being far less intelligent than the majority of the other animals, and more prone to disastrous blunders, in our relationships with others, speech is so necessary.”
― Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

“She was so angry. The maddest human being I’ve ever seen in all my years of living. Because she saw people losing ground in the battle against ignorance and she could see how it would turn out, whatever the battle was, because she had seen it all before.”
― Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

“They were not good people—they had too much money to have ever been good people”
― Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

“It was his Indianness that she saw, not his blackness. She saw it in the way he really looked at her, really saw her. With the calm, detached concentration of a shaman. He was stoned, but even so ... She had delivered many capes, shawls, headdresses, dresses, beaded and feathered headbands, sandals, and jeans to rock stars and their entourages, and in the excitement of trying on what she brought, they never saw her.”
― Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

“Life was so peaceful that Zedé did not realize they were poor.”
― Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

“Keep in mind always the present you are constructing. It should be the future you want. —Ola”
― Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

“Yet I honestly think that in her absence, and over time, she became powerfully present to him. Perhaps this is simply the way it is with writers. It is when they don’t see you that you matter. Because then you can belong to them in a way that permits them complete possession. You are determined by them. You are controlled. You are, generally speaking, exaggerated.”
― Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

“tribal cloth, the magic of which is that as long as it is woven, the tribe exists; as long as you know how to weave it, so do you.”
― Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

“This, then, was the power people like us had. The power to enslave others and to frustrate their dreams.”
― Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

“He was in the jovial mood, as he sometimes phrased it, of the literarily inclined escaped convict.”
― Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

“Did people leave you, did their spirits simply take off, because you wouldn’t read a book that turned them on? He now knew the answer was yes.”
― Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar