Quotes from Alice Walker

What happened to the man I love?'... 'Albert knew as well as me that love would have to go some to be better than ours. Us had the kind of love couldn't be improve. That's what I thought.

My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed. And I laughed and I cried and I run all around the house. I knew just what it was.

I treated you so mean. Like you was a servant. And all because Albert married you. And I didn't even want him for a husband,' she say. 'I never really wanted Albert for a husband. But just to choose me, you know?

believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you've found It.

I remember one time you said your life made you feel so ashamed you couldn't even talk about it to God, you had to write it, bad as you thought your writing was. Well, now I know what you meant. And whether God will read letters or no, I know you will go on writing them; which is guidance enough for me. Anyway, when I don't write to you I feel as bad as I do when I don't pray, locked up in myself and choking on my own heart.

The little I knew about my own self wouldn't have filled a thimble!... But one thing I do thank her for, for teaching me to learn for myself, by reading and studying and writing a clear hand. And for keeping alive in me somehow the desire to know.

Just cause I love her don't take away none of her rights.

That politicians who smiled at us and kissed our babies blue eyes shining with triumph well knew we were falling into our graves kicked by them as they counted our votes.

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.

We're asleep, said Suni. Just walking and talking, eating and shitting. Sound asleep. And we have to be that way, of course, said Anne. It's the human equivalent of fallowness. Spiritual hibernation, said Suni.

However, loving is nothing if it is not an education...

All my life I never care what people thought bout nothing I did,' I say. 'But deep down in my heart I care about God. What he going to think. And come to find out, he don't think. Just sit up there glorying in being deef, I reckon. But it ain't easy, trying to do without God. Even if you know he ain't there, trying to do without him is a strain.