Alice Walker

“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.”

“'Thank you' is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.”

“As you know from school, it's when you have not prepared for the test that you have the fear of failing. And if you have prepared, even if you fail, you've done your best.”

“As an elder of the Americas and of the rest of the planet, it is my responsibility to care for and protect, to the best of my ability, the young.”

“I can be almost terminally grief-stricken because things are so dire, but at the same time, there's a real lightheartedness about just the recoverability of life, of how things change, how they're not the same, ever again.”

“We should learn to accept that change is truly the only thing that's going on always, and learn to ride with it and enjoy it.”

“Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.”

“I'm not convinced that women have the education or the sense of their own history enough or that they understand the cruelty of which men are capable and the delight that many men will take in seeing you choose to chain yourself - then they get to say 'See, you did it yourself.'”

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

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

“Clearly older women and especially older women who have led an active life or elder women who successfully maneuver through their own family life have so much to teach us about sharing, patience, and wisdom.”

“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.”

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

“To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.”

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

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.”

“Politically, the world is so confused right now - there's so much suffering caused by various movements by various parties and people in power in government.”

“Don't wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you've got to make yourself.”

“All History is current all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world.”

“Never be the only one, except, possibly, in your own home.”

“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.”

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

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