Alice Walker

You are all talking a bit too much, said Armando, who had cautioned them from the beginning to stay out of popular culture and in their own interior worlds.When you are caught up in the world that you did not design as support for your life and the life of earth and people, it is like being caught in someone else's dream or nightmare. Many people exist in their lives in this way. I say exist because it is not really living. It is akin to being suspended in a dream one is having at night, a dream over which one has no control. You are going here and there, seeing this and that person; you do not know or care about them usually, they are just there, on your interior screen. Humankind will not survive if we continue in this way, most of us living lives in which our own life is not the center.

Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.

Our mothers and our grandmothers some of them: moving to music not yet written.

It is healthier in any case to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's "mature" critics often are.

I've found, in my own writing, that a little hatred, keenly directed, is a useful thing.

As long as the Earth can make a spring every year I can. As long as the Earth can flower and produce nurturing fruit I can because I'm the Earth. I won't give up until the Earth gives up.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

If you're silent for a long time, people just arrive in your mind.

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

No person is your friend who demands your silence or denies your right to grow.

Is solace anywhere more comforting than in the arms of sisters?

Women have to summon up courage to fulfill dormant dreams.

I have learned not to worry about love but to honor its coming with all my heart.

The Nature of This Flower is to bloom.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.

But I don't know how to fight. All I know how to do is stay alive.

All these faces look happy enough, say Shug. Big and beefy. Eyes clear and innocent, like they don't know them other crooks on the front page. But they the same folks, she say.

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.