We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For Quotes

“...there is no resistance to the idea that what is foreign can be known. Can be understood. Can be held in the embrace of love that holds the Universe. Given this Earth on which we live and grow, given its beauty and generosity, its majesty and comfort, how can one doubt that one is loved? That in fact there is an abundance, not a scarcity of love? It is all anyone ever wants, really, I believe, and it is all around us as we starve.”
― Alice Walker, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Light in a Time of Darkness

“Today Americans, who used to feel welcomed wherever we went, travel abroad with trepidation. We know we are not trusted or liked, that we are even hated, by millions of people around the globe. We must ask ourselves why this is so and do the work of discovering our historical behavior toward the other countries and peoples of the planet. As disturbing as this will be, it is a first step toward a peaceful existence. Not because we can make peace for our country, but because we can make peace without ourselves by changing any harmful behavior or attitudes that contribute to our present predicament. Choose any country on the map that appears to hate America. Listen to what people are shouting at their rallies and read what their banners proclaim in the street. Sit with their anger until you can see America through their eyes... Remember that you, yourself, are America. The U.S. Behave as if you are the entire country and carry yourself with humility and dignity.”
― Alice Walker, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Light in a Time of Darkness

“When life descends into the pit I must become my own candle Willingly burning myself To light up the darkness Around me.”
― Alice Walker, We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness

“Heaven. Now there’s a thought. Nothing has ever been able, ultimately, to convince me we live anywhere else. And that heaven, more a verb than a noun, more a condition than a place, is about leading with the heart in whatever broken or ragged state it’s in, stumbling forward in faith until, from time to time, we miraculously find our way.”
― Alice Walker, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Light in a Time of Darkness

“...continuing to love with depth and tenderness honors revolution at its highest success.”
― Alice Walker, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Light in a Time of Darkness

“Now I understand that all great teachers love us. This is essentially what makes them great. I also understand that it is this love that never dies, and that, having once experienced it, we have the confidence always exhibited by well-loved humans, to continue extending this same love.”
― Alice Walker, We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness

“At menopause, a time of extremely high power and shapeshifting, we are told to behave as though nothing is happening. To continue the “game” of life as if we are still girls. We are not girls. And to continue to act as though we are robs the world and the coming generations of our insights.”
― Alice Walker, We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness

“If my mind is crowded with ideas or thoughts or plans or other people’s creations there is less room for my own.”
― Alice Walker, We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness

“The challenge for me is not to be a follower of Something but to embody it;”
― Alice Walker, We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness

“each of us has knowledge of how to live life differently that no one taught us, and that we can find this knowledge inside ourselves and put it to use.”
― Alice Walker, We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness

“However, loving is nothing if it is not an education...”
― Alice Walker, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Light in a Time of Darkness

“Believing this, as I do, there is no resistance to the idea that what is foreign can be known. Can be understood. Can be held in the embrace of a love that is in fact the same Love that holds the Universe. Given this Earth on which we live and grow, given its beauty and generosity, its majesty and comfort, how can one doubt that one is loved? That in fact there is an abundance, not a scarcity of love? It is all anyone ever wants, really, I believe, and it is all around us while we starve.”
― Alice Walker, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Light in a Time of Darkness

“When humankind writes new laws of behavior for the world, in some Time quite different from now, one of the first must be that no one will harm anyone less powerful without first visiting her or him; eating and drinking with her or him, and meeting his or her family. I am deeply disturbed by the long-distance murder of poor and defenseless people that passes for legitimate “war” in our time. It is incredibly cowardly, and I marvel that more people don’t jump up and down in the streets, pointing this out. How much courage does it take to point and shoot a missile at a town you’ve never seen, filled with children whose voices you’ve never heard?”
― Alice Walker, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Light in a Time of Darkness

“Whether we reach this inner state of recognized divinity through prayer, meditation, dancing, swimming, walking, feeding the hungry or enriching the impoverished is immaterial. We will be doubly bereft without some form of practice that connects us, in a caring way, to what begins to feel like a dissolving world.”
― Alice Walker, We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness

“despair cannot share the same space as wonder,”
― Alice Walker, We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness

“The world is as beautiful as it ever was. It is changing, but then it always has been. This is a good time to change, and remain beautiful, with it.”
― Alice Walker, We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness

“And so I laughed. The laughter bubbled up, irrepressible. I saw the path to happiness and to liberation at a glance. It was inside myself.”
― Alice Walker, We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness

“It seems wiser to do as hermit crabs do, find a shell and inhabit it.”
― Alice Walker, We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness

“The three wealthiest people in the world own more than the GDP of forty-eight countries!”
― Alice Walker, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Light in a Time of Darkness

“The colonizing mind invites itself wherever it wishes to intrude; it is a worthwhile practice for the coming millennium to train ourselves away from such a mind.”
― Alice Walker, We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness

“It is the worst of times. It is the best of times. Try as I might I cannot find a more appropriate opening for this volume: it helps tremendously that these words have been spoken before and, thanks to Charles Dickens, written at the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities.”
― Alice Walker, We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness

“The world economy is today a huge casino. Recent analyses indicate that for every dollar that goes into trade, over one hundred end up in speculative operations completely disconnected from the real economy. As a result of this economic order, over 75 percent of the world population lives in underdevelopment, and extreme poverty has already reached 1.2 billion people in the Third World. So, far from narrowing, the gap is widening. The revenue of the richest nations that in 1960 was thirty-seven times larger than that of the poorest is now seventy-four times larger. The situation has reached such extremes that the assets of the three wealthiest persons in the world amount to the GDP of the forty-eight poorest countries combined.”
― Alice Walker, We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness

“Let us bring our attention to George’s mother. She who came, weeping, and picked up the shattered pieces of her child, as black mothers have done for so long.”
― Alice Walker, We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness

“we find ourselves in the year 2002 with an unelected president who came to office by disenfranchising black voters, just as was done, routinely, before Martin Luther King, Jr., and the rest of us were born. This is a major suffering for black people and must not be overlooked. I myself, on realizing what had happened, felt a soul sickness I had not experienced in decades. Those who wanted power beyond anything else—oil and the money to be made from oil (which is the Earth Mother’s blood)—were contemptuous of the sacrifices generations of our ancestors made.”
― Alice Walker, We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness

“The male effort to separate Wisdom from the realm of the Feminine is not only brutal and unattractive but it will always fail, though this may take, as with Buddhism, thousands of years. This is simply because the Feminine is Wisdom; it is also the Soul.”
― Alice Walker, We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness

“Do you? Do you know what really went on in the Twin Towers? I don’t.”
― Alice Walker, We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness

“Keep track of family members; talk with them, work and plan for the future with them, vacation with them, take them with you when you have something joyful to share.”
― Alice Walker, We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness

“But in this time we are beginning to see and hear from mothers and fathers who assume the role of Those Who Also Know. The world is getting its Elders back.”
― Alice Walker, We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness

“Human beings may well be unable to break free of the dictatorship of greed that spreads like a miasma over the world, but no longer will we be an inarticulate and ignorant humanity, confused by our enslavement to superior cruelty and weaponry.”
― Alice Walker, We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness

“When the Buddha, dying, entreated his followers to “be a lamp unto your self,” I understood he was willing to free his followers even from his own teachings. He had done all he could do, taught them everything he had learned. Now, their own enlightenment was up to them.”
― Alice Walker, We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness