My work is about my life, and what I want to do with it.
— Alice Walker
My life is not to be somebody else's impact - you know what I mean?
Sucking up to the biggies won't get us anywhere.
'Thank you' is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.
Well, I think indigenous peoples have ways of living on the Earth that they've had forever. And they've been overrun by organized religion, which has had a lot of money and power.
War contributes greatly to global warming, which shouldn't surprise us. All those bombs going off, all those rockets, all those planes and helicopters. All that fuel of various kinds being used. It pollutes the air and water of this very fragile and interconnected planet.
I was distressed that after 9/11, when the United States was attacked by terrorists, the United States' response was to attack Afghanistan, where some of the terrorists had been.
I think there is a sense of being forced at this time to look at America's really large shadow and that's not all that bad.
I see children, all children, as humanity's most precious resource, because it will be to them that the care of the planet will always be left.
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.
There are those who believe Black people possess the secret of joy and that it is this that will sustain them through any spiritual or moral or physical devastation.
All History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world.
What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears.
The quietly pacifist peaceful always die to make room for men who shout.
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.
All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.
The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one's people that has not previously been taken into account.
Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.
I'm for women choosing whatever they want to do but they have to really know what they are doing.
Israel is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people, both inside Israel and also in the Occupied Territories.
At one point I learned transcendental meditation. This was 30-something years ago. It took me back to the way that I naturally was as a child growing up way in the country, rarely seeing people. I was in that state of oneness with creation and it was as if I didn't exist except as a part of everything.
You know, one race will not be a survivor if the other one dies, and that's something that we should think about.
We must, I believe, start teaching our children the sanity of nonviolence much earlier.
I feel very happy to be living in Berkeley because there are a lot of people who are politically active here.
I think that wealthy white people would like to have a country that resembles the Fifties, when all the minorities were tucked away in ghettos and paid in very low wages but on the surface it was very bright and shiny and free and the rest of the world would look on it longingly.
To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.
Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.
Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week.
Is solace anywhere more comforting than that in the arms of a sister.
Horses make a landscape look beautiful.
It's so clear that you have to cherish everyone. I think that's what I get from these older black women, that every soul is to be cherished, that every flower Is to bloom.
The most important question in the world is, 'Why is the child crying?'
How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.
The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate.
I'm sure we, the American people, are the butt of jokes by those in power.
I'm not convinced that women have the education or the sense of their own history enough or that they understand the cruelty of which men are capable and the delight that many men will take in seeing you choose to chain yourself - then they get to say 'See, you did it yourself.'
I have never felt that the one thing that I am 'known for' is what I am.
Politically, the world is so confused right now - there's so much suffering caused by various movements by various parties and people in power in government.
Sexuality is one of the ways that we become enlightened, actually, because it leads us to self-knowledge.
As an elder of the Americas and of the rest of the planet, it is my responsibility to care for and protect, to the best of my ability, the young.
Fiction is such a world of freedom, it's wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.
It is justice and respect that I want the world to dust off and put - without delay, and with tenderness - back on the head of the Palestinian child. It will be imperfect justice and respect because the injustice and disrespect have been so severe. But I believe we are right to try.
The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn't want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass.
People tend to think that life really does progress for everyone eventually, that people progress, but actually only some people progress. The rest of the people don't.
Don't wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you've got to make yourself.
I try to teach my heart not to want things it can't have.
Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me.
Helped are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception and realize a partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful.
Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.
I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.
