Alice Walker

“People tend to think that life really does progress for everyone eventually, that people progress, but actually only some people progress. The rest of the people don't.”

“I think Americans generally are not used to working very hard, in terms of working for the collective. I think in our country we have taken individualism to its farthest reaches, possibly.”

“I think there is a sense of being forced at this time to look at America's really large shadow and that's not all that bad.”

“We must do everything in our power to cease the behaviour that makes children everywhere feel afraid.”

“Is solace anywhere more comforting than that in the arms of a sister.”

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

“It is natural to want to have a future.”

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

“But it ain't easy, trying to do without God even if you know he ain't there, trying to do without him is a strain”

“Hope to sin only in the service of waking up.”

“I want the Israeli government to be made accountable for its behaviour to the Palestinians, and I want the people of the U.S. to cease acting as if they don't understand what is going on.”

“My parents taught me service - not by saying, but by doing. That was my culture, the culture of my family.”

“When I joined the freedom movement in Mississippi in my early 20s, it was to come to the aid of sharecroppers, like my parents, who had been thrown off the land they'd always known - the plantations - because they attempted to exercise their 'democratic' right to vote.”

“My mother was very strong. Once, she picked up a coconut and smashed it against my father's head. It taught me about women defending themselves and not collapsing in a heap.”

“If you deny people their own voice, you'll have no idea of who they were.”

“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.”

“I'm very disappointed in Obama. I was very much in support of him in the beginning, but I cannot support war. I cannot support droning. I cannot support capitulating to the banks.”

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

“I gave my archive to Emory University because there's a really dear friend who teaches there, Rudolph Byrd, and he's the editor.”

“What's really hard is that you could care a lot for someone and not want to live with him anymore.”