01c. 1944 ADEverything want to be loved. Us sing and dance and holler, just trying to be loved.Alice Walker / quote ↗
02c. 1944 ADExpect nothing. Live frugallyOn surprise.become a strangerTo need of pityOr, if compassion be freelyGiven outTake only enoughStop short of urge to pleadThen purge away the need.Wish for nothing largerThan your own small heartOr greater than a star;Tame wild disappointmentWith caress unmoved and coldMake of it a parkaFor your soul.Discover the reason whySo tiny human midgetExists at allSo scared unwiseBut expect nothing. Live frugallyOn surprise.Alice Walker / quote ↗
03c. 1944 ADLife is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.Alice Walker / quote ↗
05c. 1944 ADThe most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.Alice Walker / quote ↗
06c. 1944 ADListen, God love everything you love - and a mess of stuff you don't. But more than anything else, God love admiration.You saying God vain? I ast.Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.What it do when it pissed off? I ast.Oh, it make something else. 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 / quote ↗
07c. 1944 ADI 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.Alice Walker / quote ↗
08c. 1944 ADI think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.Alice Walker / quote ↗
09c. 1944 ADMan 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.Alice Walker / quote ↗
10c. 1944 ADBut it ain't easy, trying to do without God even if you know he ain't there, trying to do without him is a strainAlice Walker / quote ↗
11c. 1944 ADAnd 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.Alice Walker / quote ↗
13c. 1944 ADDeliver 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.Alice Walker / quote ↗
16c. 1944 ADI've found, in my own writing, that a little hatred, keenly directed, is a useful thing.Alice Walker / quote ↗
17c. 1944 ADWhen I no longer have your heartI will not request your bodyyour presenceor even your polite conversation.I will go away to a far countryseparated from you by the sea— on which I cannot walk —and refrain even from sendinglettersdescribing my pain.Alice Walker / quote ↗
19c. 1944 ADSome periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.Alice Walker / quote ↗
20c. 1944 ADThe life of my people is to remember forever; each head granary is full. The life of your people is to forget: your thing granaries ("museums"), and not yourselves, are full.Alice Walker / quote ↗
21c. 1944 ADNo person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.Alice Walker / quote ↗
22c. 1944 ADMen make war to get attention. All killing is an expression of self-hate.Alice Walker / quote ↗
23c. 1944 ADThe 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.Alice Walker / quote ↗
24c. 1944 ADIf this were a courageous country,it would ask Gloria to lead itsince she is sane and funny and beautiful and smartand the National Leaders we've always hadare not.When I listen to her talk about women's rightschildren's rightsmen's rightsI think of the long line of Americans who should have been president, but weren't.Imagine Crazy Horse as president. Sojourner Truth.John Brown. Harriet Tubman. Black Elk or Geronimo.Imagine President Martin Luther King confrontingthe youthful "Oppie" Oppenheimer. Imagine PresidentMalcolm X going after the Klan. Imagine President StevieWonder dealing with the "Truly Needy."Imagine President Shirley Chisholm, Ron Dellums, orSweet Honey in the Rockdealing with Anything.It is imagining to make us weep with frustration,as we languish under real estate dealers, killers, and bad actors.Alice Walker / quote ↗
