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Alice Walker Quotes

By Jessica McElrath, About.com

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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.
Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.
Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.
The most important question in the world is, 'Why is the child crying?'
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.
People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.
Never be the only one, except, possibly, in your own home.
It's so clear that you have to cherish everyone. I think that's what I get from these older black women, that every soul is to be cherished, that every flower Is to bloom.
It no longer bothers me that I may be constantly searching for father figures; by this time, I have found several and dearly enjoyed knowing them all.
In search of my mother's garden, I found my own.
I'm always amazed that people will actually choose to sit in front of the television and just be savaged by stuff that belittles their intelligence.
I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.
How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.
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.
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.
All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.
The quietly pacifist peaceful always die to make room for men who shout.
The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one's people that has not previously been taken into account.
Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.
Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.
It seems our fate to be incorrect (look where we live, for example), and in our incorrectness stand.
In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they're still beautiful.
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.
I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.
Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.
Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me.