Quotes from Alice Walker

We do it because we care. We care that Vincent Van Gogh mutilated his ear. We care that behind a pile of manure in the yard he destroyed his life. We care that Scott Joplin's music lives! We care because we know this: the life we save is our own.

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.

The Lord don't like ugly, she say. And he ain't stuck on pretty.

Then he say something that really surprise me cause it so thoughtful and common sense. When it come to what folks do together with they bodies, he say, anybody's guess is as good as mine. But when you talk about love I don't have to guess. I have love and I have been love. And I thank God he let me gain understanding enough to know love can't be halted just cause some peoples moan and groan.

Hard to be Christ too, say Shug. But he manage. Remember that. Thou Shalt Not Kill, He said. And probably wanted to add on to that, Starting with me. He knowed the fools he was dealing with.

God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it.

Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.

When I no longer have your heart I will not request your body your presence or even your polite conversation. I will go away to a far country separated from you by the sea — on which I cannot walk — and refrain even from sending letters describing my pain.

I think Africans are very much like white people back home, in that they think they are the center of the universe and that everything that is done is done for them.

You saying God vain? I ast. Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.

First time I think about the world. What the world got to do with anything, I think. Then I see myself sitting there quilting tween Shug Avery and Mr ——. Us three set together gainst Tobias and his fly speck box of chocolate. For the first time in my life, I feel just right.

T}here is a point at which even grief feels absurd. And at this point, laughter gushes up to retrieve sanity.