Alice Walker

You cannot see the changes that you're dreaming about, because they're internal.

We should learn to accept that change is truly the only thing that's going on always, and learn to ride with it and enjoy it.

I love the natural world - it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved.

We must, I believe, start teaching our children the sanity of nonviolence much earlier.

Human beings may well be unable to break free of the dictatorship of greed that spreads like a miasma over the world, but no longer will we be an inarticulate and ignorant humanity, confused by our enslavement to superior cruelty and weaponry.

I'm tri-racial: African-American, Native American and Euro - that's the Scotch-Irish part.

Since the time of the witch burnings, the grandmothers and the healers and the midwives have been systematically targeted. And burned at the stake for hundreds of years, decimating whole communities.

I cannot claim to have had a hard time publishing.

People have so many hang-ups about how other people live their lives. People always want to keep you in a little box, or they need to label you and fix you in time and location.

For a long time, I thought I was ugly and disfigured. This made me shy and timid, and I often reacted to insults that were not intended.

It no longer bothers me that I may be constantly searching for father figures; by this time, I have found several and dearly enjoyed knowing them all.

June Jordan, who died of cancer in 2002, was a brilliant, fierce, radical, and frequently furious poet. We were friends for thirty years. Not once in that time did she step back from what was transpiring politically and morally in the world. She spoke up, and led her students, whom she adored, to do the same.