Alice Walker

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Life is abundant, and life is beautiful. And it's a good place that we're all in, you know, on this earth, if we take care of it.

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

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

Don't wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you've got to make yourself.

If we want to fight people in the world, we should fight them with pillows - pillows stuffed with food, medicine, music... That would be so much cheaper than bombs.

For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle; and one faces down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged.

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.

I made my first white women friends in college; they loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered.

In search of my mother's garden, I found my own.

'Thank you' is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.