Quotes by Alice Walker

Womanist .....”Mama, I’m walking to Canada and I’m taking you and a bunch of other slaves with me.” Reply: “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

..suffering under an absolute lack of models. ....The absence of models, in literature as in life, to say nothing of painting, is an occupational hazard for the artist, simply because models in art, in behaviour, in growth of spirit and intellect-even if rejected-enrich and enlarge one’s view of existence. Deadlier still, to the artist who lacks models, is the curse of ridicule, the bringing to bear on an artist’s best work, especially his or her most original, most strikingly deviant, only a fund of ignorance and the presumption that, as an artist’s critic, one’s judgement is free of the restrictions imposed by prejudice, and is well informed, indeed, about all the art in the world that really matters.

...no person is your friend (or kin ) who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow and be perceived as fully blossomed as you were intended....

..in an unjust society the soul of the sensitive person is in danger of deformity...to fight back will require a certain amount of energy, energy better used doing something else...

...but grass can be greener on the other side and not be just an illusion...grass on the other side of the fence might have good fertiliser, while grass on your side might have to grow if it grows at all, in sand.

To know is to exist: to exist is to be involved, to move about, to see the world with my own eyes. This, at least, the Movement has given me.

I envied his children, all the children of Cuba, whose parents are encouraged and permitted to continue to grow, to develop, to change, to “keep up with” their children....A society in which there is respectful communication between generations is not likely, easily, to fail.

..I found it painful to expose my thoughts in language that to him obscured more than it revealed. This separation, which neither of us wanted, is what poverty engender. It is what injustice means.....by the time of his death, all I understood, truly, of my father’s life, was how few of its possibilities he had realised, how relatively little of its probable grandeur I had known.

..and I wanted to learn, myself, how it happens that the hatred a child can have for a parent becomes inflexible.

..the child I was thought the women in our local church held together the world. Often kind beyond understanding, sometimes shrewish, stubborn, wilfully obtuse, but always there, with their dimes and quarters, their spotless children and beloved husbands, building up the church, first, and the local school, second, for the benefit of the community. The child that I was rarely saw individualistic behaviour, and when I did see it, for a long time I could understand it only as rejection of community, rather than the self-affirmation it very often was.

The bible contains six admonishments to homosexuals and 362 admonishments to heterosexuals. That doens't mean that God doesn't love heterosexuals. It's just that they need more supervision.