Alice Walker

"You think you can avoid [pain,] but you actually can't. If you do, you just get sicker, or you feel more pain. But if you can speak it, if you can write it, if you can paint it, it is very healing."

"Every small positive change we make in ourselves repays us in confidence in the future."

"There is a way that the men speak to women that reminds me too much of Pa. They listen just long enough to issue instructions. They don’t even look at women when women are speaking. They look at the ground and bend their heads toward the ground."

"Even as I hold you, I am letting you go."

"Even as I hold you I think of you as someone gonefar, far away. Your eyes the colorof pennies in a bowl of dark honeybringing sweet light to someone elseyour black hair slipping through my fingersis the flash of your head goingaround a corneryour smile, breaking before me,the flippant last turnof a revolving door,emptying you out, changed,away from me. Even as I hold you I am letting go."

"I live a very secluded life, a very contemplative life and a very meditative one. That is my ideal life."

"When it is all too much; when the news is so bad meditation itself feels useless, and a single life feels too small a stone to offer on the altar of Peace, find a Human Sunrise. Find those people who are committed to changing our scary reality. Human sunrises are happening all over the earth, at every moment. People gathering, people working to change the intolerable, people coming in their robes and sandals or in their rags and bare feet, and they are singing, or not, and they are chanting, or not. But they are working to bring peace, light, compassion, to the infinitely frightening downhill slide of Human life."

"What that song? I ast. Sound low down dirty to me. Like what the preacher tells you its sin to hear. Not to mention sing. She hum a little more. Something come to me, she say. Something I made up. Something you help scratch out my head."

"And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see - or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read."

"Long as I can spell G-o-d I got somebody along."

"All her young life she has tried to please her father, never quite realizing that, as a girl, she never could."

"Dear Nettie, I don't write to God no more, I write to you."

"They be marching hand in hand, like going to war."

"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 behavior, 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."

"Horses make a landscape look beautiful."

"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."

"The mountain of despair has dwindled, and the stone of hope has size and shape, and can be fondled by the eyes and by the hand. But freedom has always been an elusive tease, and in the very act of grabbing for it one can become shackled."

"Men make war to get attention. All killing is an expression of self-hate."

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

"Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence."