Alice Walker

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.

Since the time of the witch burnings, the grandmothers and the healers and the midwives have been systematically targeted. And burned at the stake for hundreds of years, decimating whole communities.

I deeply regret any harm, or any perceived harm, that I may have done to anyone by any behaviour of mine.

Propaganda is amazing. People can be led to believe anything.

You don't always have to be doing something. You can just be, and that's plenty.

We must, I believe, start teaching our children the sanity of nonviolence much earlier.

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

Is solace anywhere more comforting than that in the arms of a sister.

Life is abundant, and life is beautiful. And it's a good place that we're all in, you know, on this earth, if we take care of it.

Part of our tradition as black women is that we are universalists. Black children, yellow children, red children, brown children, that is the black woman's normal, day-to-day relationship. In my family alone, we are about four different colors.

Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.

My mother had bought a sewing machine for me. When I went away to college, she gave me a sewing machine, a typewriter and a suitcase, and my mother made $17 a week working as a maid 12 hours a day, and she did that for me.

If you want to have a life that is worth living, a life that expresses your deepest feelings and emotions and cares and dreams, you have to fight for it.

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

I'm not lesbian; I'm not bisexual; I'm not straight. I'm just curious.

I know black people love the idea that we finally have a beautiful, good-looking black president. But if he is doing awful things to us, we should wake up.

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

We must, all of us, learn actually not to have enemies, but only confused adversaries who are ourselves in disguise.

The most important question in the world is, 'Why is the child crying?'

It is because I recognize the brutality with which my own multi-branched ancestors have been treated that I can identify the despicable, lawless, cruel, and sadistic behavior that has characterized Israel's attempts to erase a people, the Palestinians, from their own land.