Quotes by Alice Walker
I started out as a poet. I've always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.
In my work and in myself I reflect black people, women and men, as I reflect others. One day even the most self-protective ones will look into the mirror I provide and not be afraid.
We must, I believe, start teaching our children the sanity of nonviolence much earlier.
I feel very happy to be living in Berkeley because there are a lot of people who are politically active here.
Language is an intrinsic part of who we are and what has, for good or evil, happened to us.
You know, one race will not be a survivor if the other one dies, and that's something that we should think about.
It is justice and respect that I want the world to dust off and put - without delay, and with tenderness - back on the head of the Palestinian child. It will be imperfect justice and respect because the injustice and disrespect have been so severe. But I believe we are right to try.
Well, capitalism is a big problem, because with capitalism you're just going to keep buying and selling things until there's nothing else to buy and sell, which means gobbling up the planet.
I don't call myself a Buddhist. I'm a free spirit. I believe I'm here on earth to admire and enjoy it; that's my religion.
I think that wealthy white people would like to have a country that resembles the Fifties, when all the minorities were tucked away in ghettos and paid in very low wages but on the surface it was very bright and shiny and free and the rest of the world would look on it longingly.
To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.
It's an awful feeling to write something that you feel is really important... and to feel that you're being published by people who really don't get it and/or don't really care.
The infinite faith I have in people's ability to understand anything that makes sense has always been justified, finally, by their behavior.
Sucking up to the biggies won't get us anywhere.
Sexuality is one of the ways that we become enlightened, actually, because it leads us to self-knowledge.
Israel is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people, both inside Israel and also in the Occupied Territories.
My work is about my life, and what I want to do with it.
Horses make a landscape look beautiful.
I try to teach my heart not to want things it can't have.
As an elder of the Americas and of the rest of the planet, it is my responsibility to care for and protect, to the best of my ability, the young.
I'm the most stubborn person I know.
I think there is a sense of being forced at this time to look at America's really large shadow and that's not all that bad.
Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.
For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.
