Alice Walker Quotes

My mother is from Compton, California, but my father is from Hayneville, Alabama, and that's less than 20 miles from Selma.

If we are a people who pray, darkness is apt to be a lot of what our prayers are about. If we are people who do not pray, it is apt to be darkness in one form or another that has stopped our mouths.

Some people never see the light Till it shines thru bullet holes.

Why, Tom - us people will go on livin' when all them people is gone. Why, Tom, we're the people that live. They ain't gonna wipe us out. Why, we're the people - we go on.' 'We take a beatin' all the time.' 'I know.' Ma chuckled. 'Maybe that makes us tough. Rich fellas come up an' they die, an' their kids ain't no good, an' they die out. But, Tom, we keep a-comin'. Don' you fret none, Tom. A different time's comin'.

I'm not pessimistic, because poor people tend to bounce back. We've been through worse than this - working people been through worse than this. We've got slavery and Jim Crow. We've got workers with no rights up until '35. We're going to bounce back. We are resilient, resisting people. So, it's not pessimism, but it is blues-like. It's not optimistic. We're just prisoners of hope, that's all.

Life there was hard and it made people hard.

The theater is the only institution in the world which has been dying for four thousand years and has never succumbed. It requires tough and devoted people to keep it alive.

Most people have turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it.

We cannot assume that people by virtue of the fact that they are black are going to associate themselves with progressive political struggles. We need to divest ourselves the kinds of strategies that assume that black unity black political unity is possible.

The people of Hiroshima went to work at once to restore human society in the aftermath of the great atomic flood. They were concerned to salvage their own lives, but in the process they also salvaged the souls of the people who have brought the atomic bomb.

I do definitely get boxed into this #BlackGirlMagic social activist category. But it makes me think, "Well, maybe people are able to start thinking about that concept earlier and will hopefully be inspired to delve deeper into it and research it more." I think that's just how the media works. It's just very good at compartmentalizing human beings.

There's a story behind every old ballad or work song or nonsense song that I ever knew. Sometimes it's a fascinating story. A story of people struggling for freedom, struggling to get along in this old world.

A new world will be won not by those who stand at a distance with their arms folded, but by those who are in the arena, whose garments are torn by storms and whose bodies are maimed in the course of the contest.

In every crisis, people do not respond like a school of fish. Some people become immobilized. Some people become very angry, some commit suicide, and other people begin to find solutions. And visionary organizers look at those people, recognize them and encourage them, and they become leaders of the future.

Any defeat, however trivial, may be fatal to a savior of the plain people. They never admire a messiah with a bloody nose.

We're not the only people that have had to suffer, there have always been people that've had to.

War had the effect of encouraging people to try to stay alive. Poverty, too. Survival was simply too hard-won to be given up lightly.

If all we are for is black people and white people who like black people, then I have nothing to say to Trump who is only for white people and black people who like him.

It was the world of Southern, rural, black growing up, of folks sitting on porches day and night, of folks calling your mama, 'cause you walked by and didn't speak, and of the switch waiting when you got home so that you could be taught some manners. It was a world of single black older women schoolteachers, dedicated, tough; they had taught your mama, her sisters, and her friends. They knew your people in ways that you never would and shared their insight, keeping us in touch with generations. It was a world where we had a history.

People respond to a guy who is trapped and succeeds on some level and fails on another.

A people that does not protect its racial purity will perish!

Being raised in an unstable household makes you understand that the world doesn't exist to accommodate you, which... is something a lot of people struggle to understand well into their adulthood. It makes you realize how quickly a situation can shift, how danger really is everywhere. But crises when the occur, do not catch you off guard; you have never believed you lived under a shelter of some essential benevolence. And an unstable childhood makes you appreciate calmness and not crave excitement.

I have always survived with comedy, in that I grew up very dyslexic and did not get good grades. I always thought I was dumb, and there are many people out there that would agree

I'd like to think that when I sing a song, I can let you know all about the heartbreak, struggle, lies and kicks in the ass I've gotten over the years for being black and everything else, without actually saying a word about it.