Alice Malsenior Tallulah-Kate, popularly known as Alice Walker wears many hats. A novelist, a poet, and a writer of short stories, she is also a social activist. Her national book award-winning novel The Color Purple also won her the Pulitzer Prize. She is credited with coining the term ‘womanist’, meaning a feminist of color.
Her work offers uncompromising insights into the African American culture and some of the most famous Alice Walker quotes have inspired many immensely.
48 Alice Walker Quotes That Are Amazing to Read
Alice Walker Quotes That Will Make You Feel Powerful
#1. “Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.” — Alice Walker
#2. “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” ― Alice Walker
#3. “Hard times require furious dancing. Each of us is proof.” ― Alice Walker, Hard Times Require Furious Dancing: New Poems
#4. “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.” ― Alice Walker
#5. “Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.” —Alice Walker
#6. “Be nobody’s darling; Be an outcast. Take the contradictions of your life and wrap around you like a shawl, to parry stones to keep you warm.” — Alice Walker
#7. “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” — Alice Walker
#8. “Helped are those who are content to be themselves; they will never lack mystery in their lives and the joys of self-discovery will be constant.” — Alice Walker
#9. “Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.” — Alice Walker
#10. “(A womanist). Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself. Regardless.” — Alice Walker
#11. “I have fought and kicked and fasted and prayed and cursed and cried myself to the point of existing.” — Alice Walker
#12. “The world is changing. It is no longer a world just for boys and men.” — Alice Walker
#13. “It is this broken road with pitfalls and sharp turns and unexpected traverses that has brought me joy and adventure.” — Alice Walker
#14. “Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.” — Alice Walker
#15. “Those in power must spend a lot of their time laughing at us.” — Alice Walker
#16. “Resistance is the secret of joy!” — Alice Walker
#17. “I’ve found, in my own writing, that a little hatred, keenly directed, is a useful thing.” — Alice Walker
Alice Walker Quotes on God and Heaven
#18. “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” — Alice Walker
#19. “Any God I ever found in church, I brought in myself.” — Alice Walker
#20. “People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.” — Alice Walker
#21. “I believe God is everything. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you’ve found it.” — Alice Walker
#22. “Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week.” — Alice Walker
Alice Walker Quotes on Love and Friendship
#23. “No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.” ― Alice Walker
#24. “Even as I hold you, I am letting you go.” — Alice Walker
#25. “You must learn to love only that which cannot be stolen.” — Alice Walker
#26. “Everything wants to be loved. Us sing and dance and holler, just trying to be loved.” — Alice Walker
#27. “I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.” — Alice Walker
#28. “I’m mad about the waste that happens when people who love each other can’t even bring themselves to talk.” — Alice Walker
#29. “Never offer your heart to someone who eats hearts, who finds heart meat delicious but not rare who sucks the juices drop by drop and bloody-chinned grins like a God.” — Alice Walker
#30. “The more I wonder, the more I love.”— Alice Walker
#31. “Surely the earth can be saved by all the people who insist on love.” — Alice Walker
#32. “The only way to solace anyone who loved you in life is to be a good memory.” — Alice Walker
Alice Walker Quotes on Life and Nature
#33. “In nature, nothing is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways and they’re still beautiful.” — Alice Walker
#34. “Activism is my rent for living on the planet.” — Alice Walker
#35. “Horses make a landscape look beautiful.” — Alice Walker
#36. “The nature of this flower is to bloom.” — Alice Walker
#37. “When life descends into the pit I must become my own candle willingly burning myself to light up the darkness around me.” — Alice Walker
#38. “Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.” — Alice Walker
#39. “Some people don’t understand that it is the nature of the eye to have seen forever, and the nature of the mind to recall anything that was ever known.” — Alice Walker
Alice Walker Quotes That Are Self-Reflective
#40. “In search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.” — Alice Walker
#41. “A grown child is a dangerous thing.” — Alice Walker
#42. “When the axe came into the forest, the trees said, the handle is one of us.” — Alice Walker
#43. “Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to get attention we do, except walk?” — Alice Walker
#44. “I’m always amazed that people will actually choose to sit in front of the television and just be savaged by stuff that belittles their intelligence.” — Alice Walker
#45. “We do not believe in heaven or hell; we do not believe in eternal damnation. We believe only in the unavoidable horror of hurting others and of likewise being hurt.” — Alice Walker
#46. “Resist the temptation to think what afflicts you is peculiar to you. Have faith that what is in your consciousness can be communicated to the consciousness of all. And is, in many cases, already there.” — Alice Walker
#47. “If you’re silent for a long time, people just arrive in your mind.” — Alice Walker
#48. “A writer’s heart, a poet’s heart, an artist’s heart, a musician’s heart is always breaking. It is through that broken window that we see the world.” — Alice Walker
Conclusion
Alice Walker quotes have inspired women of all classes, races, and social orders to achieve what they dream. Her words are just what women need to conquer themselves before conquering the world. Read some of her quotes to understand the struggle faced by countless women even today.
Image source: Alice Walker photo from flickr.com
