Alice Walker

"As long as the people don't fear the truth, there is hope. For once they fear it, the one who tells it doesn't stand a chance. And today, truth is still beautiful... but so frightening."

"Clearly older women and especially older women who have led an active life or elder women who successfully maneuver through their own family life have so much to teach us about sharing, patience, and wisdom."

"Creation is a sustained period of bliss, even though the subject can still be very sad. Because there's the triumph of coming through and understanding that you have, and that you did it the way only you could do it. You didn't do it the way somebody told you to do it."

"How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names."

"Howard Zinn was magical as a teacher. Witty, irreverent, and wise, he loved what he was teaching and clearly wanted his students to love it, also."

"I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it."

"I understood at a very early age that in nature, I felt everything I should feel in church but never did. Walking in the woods, I felt in touch with the universe and with the spirit of the universe."

"I wanted in my lifetime to vote for a radical Native American woman, since my vision of any future that we might have is that it will be led by women and older women."

"If you want to have a life that is worth living, a life that expresses your deepest feelings and emotions and cares and dreams, you have to fight for it."

"In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they're still beautiful."

"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."

"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."

"Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it."

"Part of our tradition as black women is that we are universalists. Black children, yellow children, red children, brown children, that is the black woman's normal, day-to-day relationship. In my family alone, we are about four different colors."

"Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness."

"Propaganda is amazing. People can be led to believe anything."

"The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate."

"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any."

"Women have to be extremely careful about choosing something that they consider an act of defiance that can really be used to further their enslavement."

"Women have to summon up courage to fulfill dormant dreams."

"Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me."

"You know how big love is? Love is big. love can hold anger; love can even hold hatred."