If you’re looking for some inspirational words, the below Alice Walker quotes reflect compassion, resilience, self-love, justice, and the power of finding one’s authentic voice.
Alice Walker Short Biography
Alice Walker is an American writer, poet, and activist, born in 1944 in rural Georgia. She grew up in a segregated society that deeply shaped her voice and vision. Walker gained worldwide recognition for The Color Purple, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Her work explores race, gender, identity, and resilience, blending art with social justice.
Alice Walker did not begin as a literary icon; she became one through language. Raised in the American South, she learned early how silence could wound, so she turned it into voice. Her personal struggles became questions, the questions became stories, and the stories became quiet acts of resistance.
Alice never wrote to please, but to reveal—seeking meaning rather than applause. In her work, vulnerability stands beside strength, womanhood meets freedom, and memory opens the door to hope. Alice Walker is not just read; she is felt.
10 Best Alice Walker Quotes
I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.
‘Thank you’ is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.
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.
No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.
In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.
Don’t wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you’ve got to make yourself.
What the mind doesn’t understand, it worships or fears.
The most important question in the world is, ‘Why is the child crying?’
For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle; and one faces down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged.
24 Alice Walker Quotes About Life and Writing
First Part
Time moves slowly, but passes quickly.
For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone life, just really being present to a lot of life.
Writing is not different from life—you want variety, you want refreshment, and you want balance.
I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.
Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.
Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.
People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.
“Part of writing is not so much that you’re going to actually write something every day, but what you should have, or need to have, is the possibility, which means the space and time set aside—as if you were going to have someone come to tea.” – Alice Walker
Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.
I believe in moments, collective action to influence the future.
Look closely at the present you are constructing: it should look like the future you are dreaming.
Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.
Second Part
The fact is that when you do something from your heart, you leave a heart print.
Activism is my rent for living on the planet.
The most healthy thing is to be true to your own self, but also, that you have a right to express what you see and what you feel and what you think. To be bold.
War will stop when we no longer praise it, or give it any attention at all.
Propaganda is amazing. People can be led to believe anything.
Horses make a landscape look beautiful.
Hard times require furious dancing. Each of us is proof.
In hard times, we are advised by all wise people to look to the margins of a culture, not the center.
People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.
Your caring is actually part of what you are offering: I care, and therefore I offer this.
I think ‘The Color Purple’ is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the need for connection around the globe.
Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week.
11 Quotes on Power and Change
“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.”- Alice Walker
Part of what existence means to me is knowing the distance between what I am now and what I was then.
I’m mad about the waste that happens when people who love each other can’t even bring themselves to talk.
I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.
All History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world.
You don’t always have to be doing something. You can just be, and that’s plenty.
Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.
If you lie to yourself about your own pain, you will be killed by those who will claim you enjoyed it.
I deeply regret any harm, or any perceived harm, that I may have done to anyone by any behaviour of mine.
I understood at a very early age that in nature, I felt everything I should feel in church but never did. Walking in the woods, I felt in touch with the universe and with the spirit of the universe.
7 Alice Walker Quotes on Feminism and Racism
“Clearly older women and especially older women who have led an active life or elder women who successfully maneuver through their own family life have so much to teach us about sharing, patience, and wisdom.” – Alice Walker
Sexuality is one of the ways that we become enlightened, actually, because it leads us to self-knowledge.
Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.
Why any woman give a shit what people think is a mystery to me.
The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.
Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance and holler, just trying to be loved.
Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.
Latest Thought About Alice Walker Quotes
In conclusion, Alice Walker’s quotes endure because they speak gently yet boldly to the human spirit, urging empathy, self-awareness, justice, and the courage to live truthfully.
