Alice Walker

Author, Poet and Activist

Alice Walker is an internationally celebrated author, poet and activist whose books include seven novels, four collections of short stories, four children’s books, and volumes of essays and poetry. She’s best known for The Color Purple, the 1983 novel for which she won the Pulitzer Prize—the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction—and the National Book Award. The award-winning novel served as the inspiration for Steven Spielberg’s 1985 film and was adapted for the stage, opening at New York City’s Broadway Theatre in 2005, and capturing a Tony Award for best leading actress in a musical in 2006.

Walker has written many additional best sellers; among them, Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), which detailed the devastating effects of female genital mutilation and led to the 1993 documentary “Warrior Marks,” a collaboration with the British-Indian filmmaker Pratibha Parmar, and We are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness.(2009). Her work has been translated into more than two dozen languages, and her books have sold more than fifteen million copies. Along with the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award,Walker’s awards and fellowships include a Guggenheim Fellowship and a residency at Yaddo. In 2006, she was honored as one of the inaugural inductees into the California Hall of Fame. In 2007, her archives were opened to the public at Emory University. In 2010 she presented the key note address at The 11th Annual Steve Biko Lecture at the University of Cape Town,Cape Town,South Africa, and was awarded the Lennon/Ono Peace Grant in Reykjavik,Iceland. (Walker donated this latter award to an orphanage for the children of AIDS victims inEast Africa.)(AliceWalkersGarden.com)

To learn more about Alice Walker's work visit: AliceWalkersGarden.com

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Simple Reminders by Alice Walker

Other Amazing Quotes by Alice Walker

Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender. by @alicewalkerfilm http://smpl.ws/al (49)

The quietly pacifist peaceful always die to make room for men who shout. by @alicewalkerfilm http://smpl.ws/al (26)

It just seems clear to me that as long as we are all here, it's pretty clear that the struggle is to share the planet, rather than divide it. by @alicewalkerfilm http://smpl.ws/al (-21)

Being happy is not the only happiness. by @alicewalkerfilm http://smpl.ws/al (60)

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. by @alicewalkerfilm http://smpl.ws/al (-98)

How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names. by @alicewalkerfilm http://smpl.ws/al (0)

In search of my mother's garden, I found my own. by @alicewalkerfilm http://smpl.ws/al (50)

Ignorance, arrogance, and racism have bloomed as Superior Knowledge in all too many universities. by @alicewalkerfilm http://smpl.ws/al (1)

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. by @alicewalkerfilm http://smpl.ws/al (-26)

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. by @alicewalkerfilm http://smpl.ws/al (-66)

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it. by @alicewalkerfilm http://smpl.ws/al (0)

Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week. by @alicewalkerfilm http://smpl.ws/al (12)

In order to be able to live in America I must be unafraid to live anywhere in it, and I must be able to live in the fashion and with whom I choose. by @alicewalkerfilm http://smpl.ws/al (-27)

All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience. by @alicewalkerfilm http://smpl.ws/al (-68)

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. by @alicewalkerfilm http://smpl.ws/al (-14)

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any. by @alicewalkerfilm http://smpl.ws/al (16)

What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears. by @alicewalkerfilm http://smpl.ws/al (43)

Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be. by @alicewalkerfilm http://smpl.ws/al (50)

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. by @alicewalkerfilm http://smpl.ws/al (-37)

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's "mature" critics often are. by @alicewalkerfilm http://smpl.ws/al (-16)

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. by @alicewalkerfilm http://smpl.ws/al (-55)

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence. by @alicewalkerfilm http://smpl.ws/al (38)

Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it. by @alicewalkerfilm (7)

Don't wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you've got to make yourself. by @alicewalkerfilm (13)

I try to teach my heart not to want things it can't have. by @alicewalkerfilm http://smpl.ws/al (41)

Activism is my rent for living on this planet. by @alicewalkerfilm http://smpl.ws/al (52)

Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise. by @alicewalkerfilm http://smpl.ws/al (56)