When it is all too much; when the news is so bad meditation itself feels useless, and a single life feels too small a stone to offer on the altar of Peace, find a Human Sunrise. Find those people who are committed to changing our scary reality. Human sunrises are happening all over the earth, at every moment. People gathering, people working to change the intolerable, people coming in their robes and sandals or in their rags and bare feet, and they are singing, or not, and they are chanting, or not. But they are working to bring peace, light, compassion, to the infinitely frightening downhill slide of Human life.

— Alice Walker

When the ax came into the forest the trees said the handle is one of us.

— Alice Walker

Why should the killers of the world be "the future" and not us?

— Alice Walker

Women have to summon up courage to fulfill dormant dreams.

— Alice Walker

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

— Alice Walker

Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.

— Alice Walker

You are all talking a bit too much, said Armando, who had cautioned them from the beginning to stay out of popular culture and in their own interior worlds. When you are caught up in the world that you did not design as support for your life and the life of earth and people, it is like being caught in someone else's dream or nightmare. Many people exist in their lives in this way. I say exist because it is not really living. It is akin to being suspended in a dream one is having at night, a dream over which one has no control. You are going here and there, seeing this and that person; you do not know or care about them usually, they are just there, on your interior screen. Humankind will not survive if we continue in this way, most of us living lives in which our own life is not the center.

— Alice Walker

You know how big love is? Love is big. Love can hold anger love can even hold hatred.

— Alice Walker

You're telling me God love you, and you ain't never done nothing for him? I mean, not go to church, sing in the choir, feed the preacher and all like that? But if God love me, Celia, I don't have to do all that. Unless I want to. There are a lot of other things I can do that I speck God likes. Like what? I AST. Oh, she says. I can lay back and just admire stuff. Be happy. Have a good time. Well, this sounds like blasphemy sure enough. She says, Celia, tell the truth, have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.

— Alice Walker

You think you can avoid [pain, ] but you actually can't. If you do, you just get sicker, or you feel more pain. But if you can speak it, if you can write it, if you can paint it, it is very healing.

— Alice Walker