Alice Walker Quotes: 12

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

• The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.

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

  The Color Purple

• 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.

• 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.

• I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering bout the big things and asking bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, the more I love.

  The Color Purple

• Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance and holler, just trying to be loved.

  The Color Purple

• Man corrupt everything, say Shug. He on your box of grits, in your head, and all over the radio. He try to make you think he everywhere. Soon as you think he everywhere, you think he God. But he ain't. Whenever you trying to pray, and man plop himself on the other end of it, tell him to git lost, say Shug. Conjure up the flowers, wind, water, a big rock.

  The Color Purple

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

  Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology

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

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

• And I don't believe you dead. How can you be dead if I still feel you? Maybe, like God, you changed into something different that I'll have to speak to in a different way, but you not dead to me Nettie. And never will you be.

  The Color Purple