Possessing the Secret of Joy Quotes

“If you lie to yourself about your own pain, you will be killed by those who will claim you enjoyed it.”
― Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy

“the God of woman is autonomy”
― Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy

“World wars have been fought and lost; for every war is against the world and every war against the world is lost.”
― Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy

“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.”
― Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy

“Religion is an elaborate excuse for what man has done to women and to the earth”
― Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy

“As others might prepare for an exam whose subject matter is unknown to them, so I must study, cram, for every conversation with my folks.”
― Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy

“My fantasy life. Without it I'm afraid to exist.”
― Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy

“This book is dedicated with tenderness and respect to the blameless vulva”
― Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy

“It is as if my self is hiding behind an iron door.”
― Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy

“RESISTANCE IS THE SECRET OF JOY! it says in huge block letters.”
― Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy

“An American, I said, sighing, but understanding my love of my adopted country perhaps for the first time: an American looks like a wounded person whose wound is hidden from others, and sometimes from herself. An American looks like me.”
― Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy

“When the axe came into the forest, the trees said the handle is one of us.”
― Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy

“There is for human beings no greater hell to fear than the one on earth.”
― Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy

“Tashi dice que quiere enfrentarse al pelotón de fusilamiento vestida de rojo. Le recuerdo que su sentencia está siendo apelada. También cabe la esperanza de que los Estados Unidos hagan valer la ciudadanía norteamericana de Tashi. Es igual, quiero ir de rojo, dice, pase lo que pase. Estoy harta del blanco y el negro. Ninguno va primero. El rojo, el color de la sangre de mujer, los precede a ambos.
De modo que cosemos.”
― Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy

“I think of the meaning of the word "testimony." Originally it named the custom of two men holding each other's testicles in a gesture of trust, later to metamorphose into the handshake.”
― Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy

“How wearying to think nobody in this courtroom has ever listened to them. I see each one of them as the little child my father was always so concerned about, screaming her terror eternally into her own ear.”
― Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy

“If every man in this courtroom had had his penis removed, what then? Would they understand better that that condition is similar to that of all the women in this room? That, even as we sit here, the women are suffering from the unnatural constrictions of flesh their bodies have been whittled and refashioned into?”
― Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy

“Or are they saying simply that they can not and will not be bothered to listen to what is said about an accepted tradition of which they are a part, that has gone on, as far as they know, forever?”
― Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy

“THEY DO NOT WANT to hear what their children suffer. They’ve made the telling of the suffering itself taboo.”
― Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy

“I saw everything fresh, and with wonder that I was in America at all. If a white person was rude I simply turned and stared. I never acknowledged the system that sanctioned rude behavior, but always responded directly to the person. How uncivilly you have been brought up! was the message of my stare.”
― Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy

“¡LA RESISTENCIA ES EL SECRETO DE LA ALEGRÍA!, dice en grandes letras de molde.

Hay un estruendo como si el mundo se quebrara y abriera. Vuelvo adentro. Ya no soy más. Y estoy satisfecha.”
― Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy

“In truth, it made me pity him, and see him as a fool.”
― Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy

“No, no, he used to correct me. They behave this way not because I’m black but because they are white.”
― Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy