|
1806206
|
She look like she ain't long for this world but dressed well for the next.
|
|
|
Alice Walker |
|
ca2c814
|
If you was my wife, she say, I'd cover you up with kisses stead of licks, and work hard for you too.
|
|
|
Alice Walker |
|
3a26410
|
We do it because we care. We care that Vincent Van Gogh mutilated his ear. We care that behind a pile of manure in the yard he destroyed his life. We care that Scott Joplin's music lives! We care because we know this: the life we save is our own.
|
|
life
inspirational
vincent-van-gogh
|
Alice Walker |
|
07dc040
|
The good ones who listen to women to children and the poor die too soon, their lives bedeviled by opposition: our hearts grieve for them. This was the world my father knew. A poor man he saw good men come and mostly go; leaving behind the stranded and bereft. People of hopes, dreams, and so much hard work! Yearning for a future suddenly foreclosed. But today you write me all is well even though the admirable Hugo Chavez has died this aftern..
|
|
|
Alice Walker |
|
ad6baa1
|
For you will find, as women have found through the ages, that changing the world requires a lot of free time. Requires a lot of mobility. Requires money, and, as Virginia Woolf put it so well, "a room of one's own," preferably one with a key and a lock. Which means that women must be prepared to think for themselves, which means, undoubtedly, trouble with boyfriends, lovers, and husbands, which means all kinds of heartache and misery, and t..
|
|
|
alice walker |
|
7cd99c0
|
The longer I am a writer--so long now that my writing finger is periodically numb--the better I understand what writing is; what its function is; what it is supposed to do. I learn that the writer's pen is a microphone held up to the mouths of ancestors and even stones of long ago. That once given permission by the writer--a fool, and so why should one fear?--horses, dogs, rivers, and, yes, chickens can step forward and expound on their liv..
|
|
|
Alice Walker |
|
673e131
|
She sicker than my mama was when she die. But she more evil than my mama and that keep her alive.
|
|
|
Alice Walker |
|
7c1c71e
|
We are a people. A people do not throw their geniuses away. And if they are thrown away, it is our duty as artists and as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children, and, if necessary, bone by bone.
|
|
|
Alice Walker |
|
6e34d11
|
If he ever listened to poor colored women the world would be a different place, I can tell you.
|
|
|
Alice Walker |
|
1dc7e20
|
For several years, while I searched for, found, and studied black women writers, I deliberately shut O'Connor out, feeling almost ashamed that she had reached me first. And yet, even when I no longer read her, I missed her, and realized that though the rest of America might not mind, having endured it so long, I would never be satisfied with a segregated literature. I would have to read Zora Hurston and Flannery O'Connor, Nella Larsen and C..
|
|
reading
well-read
segregation
perspective
|
Alice Walker |
|
01b3404
|
Do you know what O'Keefe Says about blue? he asked her, blowing out a cloud of smoke, warming to her voice, though he did not remember her face clearly from the opening night's exhibition. What? That it is the color that will remain after everything is destroyed.
|
|
|
Alice Walker |
|
baa95cb
|
All womens not alike, Tobias, she say. Believe it or not. Oh, I believe it, he say. Just can't prove it to the world.
|
|
|
Alice Walker |
|
89b98a5
|
It always making little surprises and springing them on us when us least expect.
|
|
|
Alice Walker |
|
c1fe7e2
|
What is a promise if not your hand in mine?
|
|
|
Alice Walker |
|
b6ab884
|
And then, just when I know I can live content without Shug, just when Mr. ___ done ast me to marry him again, this time in the spirit as well as in the flesh, and just after I say, Naw, I still don't like frogs, but let's us be friends, Shug write me she's coming home. Now. Is this life or not? *I be so calm.* If she come, I be happy. If she don't I be content. And then I figure this the lesson I was suppose to learn.
|
|
the-color-purple
sense-of-self
|
Alice Walker |
|
950b684
|
If she come, I be happy. If she don't, I be content. And then I figure this the lesson I was suppose tolearn.
|
|
happiness
|
Alice Walker |
|
78429d3
|
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.' 'Yeah?' I say. 'Yeah,' she say. 'It always making little surprises and springing them on us when us least expect.' 'You mean it want to be loved, j..
|
|
|
Alice Walker |
|
d84fb50
|
The savage rushing of the river seemed to be inside her head, inside her body. Even when the oarswomen, their guides, were speaking to her, she had the impression she couldn't quite hear them because of the roar. Not of the river that did indeed roar, just behind them, close to the simple shelter they'd made for her, but because of an internal roar as of the sound of a massive accumulation of words, spoken all at once, but collected over a ..
|
|
words
river
|
Alice Walker |
|
da1f1eb
|
subservience of any kind is death to the spirit.
|
|
|
Alice Walker |
|
46d2911
|
The 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."
|
|
spirituality
oral-tradition
materialism
|
Alice Walker |
|
99202e6
|
Why you like this, huh? Why you always think you have to do things your own way? I ast your mama bout it one time, while you was in jail. What she say? ast Sofia. She say you think your way as good as anybody else's. Plus, it yours. Sofia laugh.
|
|
|
Alice Walker |
|
d0014cf
|
When I no longer have your heart I will not request your body your presence or even your polite conversation. I will go away to a far country separated from you by the sea -- on which I cannot walk -- and refrain even from sending letters describing my pain.
|
|
poems
relationships
poetry
heartbreak
heartache
|
Alice Walker |
|
6852b46
|
And when they spy on us let them discover us loving
|
|
social-justice
love
surveillance-state
surveillance-society
surveillance
|
Alice Walker |
|
d3981a7
|
Every stitch i sew will be a kiss.
|
|
|
Alice Walker |
|
d0f7a03
|
First time I got the full sight of Shug Avery long black body with it black plum nipples, look like her mouth, I thought I had turned into a man
|
|
black-skin
lesbian
black
race
gender
lust
|
Alice Walker |
|
912499b
|
I have the uncanny feeling that, just at the end of my life, I am beginning to reinhabit completely the body I long ago left.
|
|
|
Alice Walker |
|
4f416e7
|
Some people think politeness is an invitation to invade.
|
|
|
Alice Walker |
|
a8d67b2
|
First time I think about the world. What the world got to do with anything, I think. Then I see myself sitting there quilting tween Shug Avery and Mr ----. Us three set together gainst Tobias and his fly speck box of chocolate. For the first time in my life, I feel just right.
|
|
|
Alice Walker |
|
0f0126b
|
The Lord don't like ugly, she say. And he ain't stuck on pretty.
|
|
|
Alice Walker |
|
150f1b5
|
It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That's how I come to know trees fear man.
|
|
persona
comfort
change
defence
dehumanisation
abuse-survivor
tree
wood
|
Alice Walker |
|
1c5e9a0
|
There is so much we don't understand. And so much unhappiness comes because of that.
|
|
|
Alice Walker |
|
eb957b6
|
Without money of one's own in a capitalist society, there is no such thing as independence.
|
|
|
Alice Walker |
|
e658818
|
What is always needed in the appreciation of art, or life, is the larger perspective. Connections made, or at least attempted, where none existed before, the straining to encompass in one's glance at the varied world the common thread, the unifying theme through immense diversity, a fearlessness of growth, of search, of looking, that enlarges the private and the public world. And yet, in our particular society, it is the narrowed and narrow..
|
|
existence
courage
life
narrow-mindedness
open-mindedness
perspective
growth
society
|
Alice Walker |
|
45dbd4a
|
World wars have been fought and lost; for every war is against the world and every war against the world is lost.
|
|
|
Alice Walker |
|
ae8c82a
|
Loving humans means writing poems & songs novels & plays, slogans, chants & protest signs our critics want to stone us for while we think of them as people under different circumstances we might be able to help
|
|
|
Alice Walker |
|
50853fe
|
When Toni Morrison said she writes the kind of books she wants to read, she was acknowledging the fact that in a society in which "accepted literature" is so often sexist and racist and otherwise irrelevant or offensive to so many lives, she must do the work of two. She must be her own model as well as the artist attending, creating, learning from, realizing the model, which is to say, herself."
|
|
|
Alice Walker |
|
a7c054f
|
I think Africans are very much like white people back home, in that they think they are the center of the universe and that everything that is done is done for them.
|
|
|
Alice Walker |
|
0d5ce82
|
The real revolution is always concerned with the least glamorous stuff. With raising a reading level from second grade to third. With simplifying history and writing it down (or reciting it) for the old folks. With helping illiterates fill out a food-stamps form - for they must eat, revolution or not.
|
|
revolution
|
Alice Walker |
|
fa27e9a
|
A girl is nothing to herself; only to her husband can she become something. What can she become? I asked. Why, she said, the mother of his children. But I am not the mother of anybody's children, I said, and I am something.
|
|
|
Alice Walker |
|
94635ba
|
She thinks her sister has held life always in the palm of one hand, that "no" is a word the world never learned to say to her."
|
|
|
Alice Walker |
|
af8b1e4
|
She look me over from head to foot. Then she cackle. Sound like a death rattle. You sure is ugly, she say, like she ain't believed it.
|
|
|
Alice Walker |
|
3422fa8
|
Today Americans, who used to feel welcomed wherever we went, travel abroad with trepidation. We know we are not trusted or liked, that we are even hated, by millions of people around the globe. We must ask ourselves why this is so and do the work of discovering our historical behavior toward the other countries and peoples of the planet. As disturbing as this will be, it is a first step toward a peaceful existence. Not because we can make p..
|
|
|
Alice Walker |
|
1c9f5d0
|
The world is changing, I said. It is no longer a world just for boys and men. Our women are respected here, said the father. We would never let them tramp the world as American women do. There is always someone to look after the Olinka woman. A father. An uncle. A brother or nephew. Do not be offended, Sister Nettie, but our people pity women such as you who are cast out, we know not from where, into a world unknown to you, where you must s..
|
|
women-s-rights
women
gender-inequality
gender-stereotypes
men-and-women
gender
|
Alice Walker |
|
2fd2b90
|
Choose someone to love who wouldn't even hear of it.
|
|
|
Alice Walker |