Alice Walker

Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.

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

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.

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.

I think 'The Color Purple' is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the need for connection around the globe.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.

I grew up in the South under segregation. So, I know what terrorism feels like — when your father could be taken out in the middle of the night and lynched just because he didn't look like he was in an obeying frame of mind when a white person said something he must do. I mean, that's terrorism, too.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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