Looking for the best and inspirational Alice Walker quotes?
Alice Walker is a novelist and short-story writer. She is best known for the critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple.
She was born in 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia, and was raised by her mother. Her father left the family when she was just two years old. When she was 13, her mother suffered from a stroke and died about a year later from complications related to diabetes.
After high school, Alice enrolled at Spelman College but transferred to Sarah Lawrence College when she realized that there were no black people at the school. While attending Sarah Lawrence, Walker became involved with The Harlem Writers Guild and began writing for Liberator magazine under the guidance of James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry. She is the author of numerous award-winning novels, short stories, and essays.
Here are some of her most inspiring quotes on love, life, and purple to amaze you and change your mindset.
30 Inspirational Alice Walker Quotes
1. “Don’t wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you’ve got to make for yourself.“ —Alice Walker
2. “Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.” ― Alice Walker
3. “Expect nothing, live frugally on surprise.” ― Alice Walker
4. “Decide that you know what you think is good for you and go ahead and do it.” ― Alice Walker
5. “What gardening teaches us is that if you plant things, they’ll come up. But you have to be willing to wait for them to bear fruit because things are seasonal.” ― Alice Walker
6. “Without money of one’s own in a capitalist society, there is no such thing as independence.” ― Alice Walker
7. “Hard times require furious dancing. Each of us is proof.” ― Alice Walker
8. “What the mind doesn’t understand, it worships or fears.” ― Alice Walker
9. “The quietly pacifist peaceful always die to make room for men who shout.” ― Alice Walker
10. “Part of what existence means to me is knowing the distance between what I am now and what I was then.” ― Alice Walker
11. “We are a people. A people do not throw their geniuses away. If they do, it is our duty as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children. If necessary, bone by bone.” ― Alice Walker
12. “No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.” ― Alice Walker
13. “The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate.” ― Alice Walker
14. “Too much respect for people who are not respectful to you is a sure sign of insecurity.” ― Alice Walker
15. “If you lie to yourself about your own pain, you will be killed by those who will claim you enjoyed it.” ― Alice Walker
16. “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” ― Alice Walker
17. “War will stop when we no longer praise it, or give it any attention at all.” ― Alice Walker
18. “Never be the only one, except, possibly, in your own home.” ― Alice Walker
19. “All History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world.” ― Alice Walker
20. “Time moves quickly but passes quickly.” ― Alice Walker
21. “Keep in mind always the present you are constructing. It should be the future you want.” ― Alice Walker
22. “There are ways that the spirit can be mended just as there are ways that the spirit can be broken.” ― Alice Walker
23. “It’s better to have your blackness taken away than to stand there and lie about who you actually are. That’s the trap.” ― Alice Walker
24. “How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mother’s names.” ― Alice Walker
25. “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” ― Alice Walker
26. “We will be ourselves and free, or die in the attempt. Harriet Tubman was not our great-grandmother for nothing.” ― Alice Walker
27. “Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.” ― Alice Walker
28. “It seems our fate is to be incorrect … and in our incorrectness stand.” ― Alice Walker
29. “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.” ― Alice Walker
30. “No person is your friend who demands your silence or denies your right to grow.” ― Alice Walker