Alice Walker

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.

The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one's people that has not previously been taken into account.

You know how big love is? Love is big. love can hold anger love can even hold hatred.

For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn't poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.

Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.

Part of our tradition as black women is that we are universalists. Black children, yellow children, red children, brown children, that is the black woman's normal, day-to-day relationship. In my family alone, we are about four different colors.

How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.

Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.

Creation is a sustained period of bliss, even though the subject can still be very sad. Because there's the triumph of coming through and understanding that you have, and that you did it the way only you could do it. You didn't do it the way somebody told you to do it.

I made my first white women friends in college; they loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered.

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.

In search of my mother's garden, I found my own.

The infinite faith I have in people's ability to understand anything that makes sense has always been justified, finally, by their behavior.

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.

Most damage that others do us is out of fear, humiliation and pain. Those feelings occur in all of us, not just in those of us who profess a certain religious or racial devotion.

The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate.

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.

Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.