The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.
Alice Walker
In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they're still beautiful.
'Thank you' is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.
No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.
Is solace anywhere more comforting than that in the arms of a sister.
Don't wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you've got to make yourself.
In search of my mother's garden, I found my own.
All History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world.
We should learn to accept that change is truly the only thing that's going on always, and learn to ride with it and enjoy it.
I understood at a very early age that in nature, I felt everything I should feel in church but never did. Walking in the woods, I felt in touch with the universe and with the spirit of the universe.
I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.
Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.
Sexuality is one of the ways that we become enlightened, actually, because it leads us to self-knowledge.
What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears.
You don't always have to be doing something. You can just be, and that's plenty.
I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.
Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.
Propaganda is amazing. People can be led to believe anything.
And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see - or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.
Life is abundant, and life is beautiful. And it's a good place that we're all in, you know, on this earth, if we take care of it.
Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.
The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.
Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.
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.
If you want to have a life that is worth living, a life that expresses your deepest feelings and emotions and cares and dreams, you have to fight for it.
I think 'The Color Purple' is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the need for connection around the globe.
The fact is that when you do something from your heart, you leave a heart print.
I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to.
A people do not throw their geniuses away. And if they are thrown away, it is our duty as artists and as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children and, if necessary, bone by bone.
Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week.
For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle; and one faces down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged.
Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors.
People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.
I'm not lesbian; I'm not bisexual; I'm not straight. I'm just curious.
Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.
I try to teach my heart not to want things it can't have.
The most important question in the world is, 'Why is the child crying?'
I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.
I think writing really helps you heal yourself. I think if you write long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write, as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame.
If you deny people their own voice, you'll have no idea of who they were.
As long as the people don't fear the truth, there is hope. For once they fear it, the one who tells it doesn't stand a chance. And today, truth is still beautiful... but so frightening.
Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.
Horses make a landscape look beautiful.
Clearly older women and especially older women who have led an active life or elder women who successfully maneuver through their own family life have so much to teach us about sharing, patience, and wisdom.
This is a wonderful planet, and it is being completely destroyed by people who have too much money and power and no empathy.
America is not nearly done. We're only in the beginning. Who knows who we will be? Who knows... what color we will be? It is all something that, maybe, our descendants - if they survive that long - will see.
You know how big love is? Love is big. love can hold anger; love can even hold hatred.
I live a very secluded life, a very contemplative life and a very meditative one. That is my ideal life.
One of the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement is that when you travel through the South today, you do not feel overwhelmed by a residue of grievance and hate.
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.
