Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, has written fiction about African American womens experience. Alice Walker has also been an activist on environmental, feminist, and womanist causes, as well as working for racial and economic justice.

Selected Alice Walker Quotations

• Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.

• The quietly pacifist peaceful

always die

to make room for men

who shout.

• It just seems clear to me that as long as we are all here, its pretty clear that the struggle is to share the planet, rather than divide it.

• Being happy is not the only happiness.

• 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.

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

• In search of my mothers garden, I found my own.

• Ignorance, arrogance, and racism have bloomed as Superior Knowledge in all too many universities.

• No person is your friend (or kin) who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow and be perceived as fully blossomed as you were intended.

• I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to.

• (from The Color Purple) Tell the truth, have you ever found God in a church?

I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I evr felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.

• (from The Color Purple) I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and dont notice it.

• Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week.

• The most important question in the world is, Why is the child crying?

• In order to be able to live in America I must be unafraid to live

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Two African American women, Alice Walker and Gloria Naylor win American Book Awa

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