Alice Walker

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. ”

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

I think all documentaries leave out areas of people's lives. Which is good. There are areas that need not be explored. ”

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's an ecstatic side to writing. It's like jazz. It just has a life. ”

My work is about my life, and what I want to do with it. ”

I think many people in my community had very different kinds of mothers: they had mothers who acquiesced in the system of male and white-supremacist domination, and my mother never did. She just could not do it. It just wasn't in her. ”

I just feel that 'The Color Purple,' which was my 10th book, was a true gift from my ancestors. ”

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. ”

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