The Top 5 Alice Walker Quotes

Top 5 Alice Walker Quotes

Alice Walker is a contemporary writer and poet born in 1946.
Her most widely known work was the acclaimed “The Color
Purple” which won her the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Alice
Walker was the last of 8th children born to a poor
sharecropper and his wife in Eatonton Georgia in 1946. Alice
Walker was educated despite the odds against her in those
days of separate and unequal facilities and the tendency to
devalue all women but especially those of color.

Alice Walker has registered her views on many subjects and
yet the body of her work speaks to the plight of black women
in a world where a black woman struggles against dual
oppressions, that of discrimination and hate of African
Americans by whites and that of oppression from males both
black and white.

Alice Walker quotes cover topics as earthy and practical as
love, friendship, the value of self worth, literary critics
and more, and as an author her words tend to be
inspirational, self confirming. Her quotes are often full of
earthy good sense which she inherited and devotedly searched
for in the life of her mother and other women of color who
helped form the culture inherited by black women today.
Contained herein are the top 5 Alice Walker quotes, speaking
on love, marriage, friendship and the value of women and
above all self empowerment.

“In search of my mother’s garden I found my own”

While attempting to interpret the meaning behind any
author’s words is a risky business often best left to
critics, the Alice Walker quote “In search of my mother’s
garden I found my own”, tends to clarify her view on her
mother, and those women of color who paved the way for all
the women after. Alice Walker has demonstrated a reverence
for the earthy wisdom and nurturing nature of women,
particularly her mother, in all of her published works.

“Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of
violence.”

Alice Walker was born and educated during a tumultuous and
sometimes violent upheaval for African Americans in the
United States. She was an activist during the civil rights
movement of the 1960s and interrupted her studies at
University to become an active part of this movement. She
has remained outspoken on matters of racial prejudice and
hate and in fact her most widely acclaimed novel “The Color
Purple” was written from the viewpoint of a young black
woman facing oppression in rural Georgia during the 1930s.

“The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of
society or one’s people that has not previously been taken
into account.”

Alice Walker has been accused at times of championing
unpopular or radical causes merely as a matter of principle.
However, her early life may account for this quote since an
accident with her brother’s BB gun robbed her of the sight
of one eye when she was young. Because her parents had no
access to a car by the time she was able to see a doctor, an
unsightly cataract had grown over the eye. This caused this
shy and sensitive young black girl to become more withdrawn
and perhaps strongly influenced much of her later growth
both as a young woman and as a writer.

“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’s works have focused upon the similarities of
people as well as the discrimination and hate crimes so
common during her formative years. She has often been quoted
as championing the cause of viewing people as just that,
people. In fact she was married and amicably divorced to
renowned Jewish civil rights attorney Melvyn Roseman
Leventhal. The couple later moved to Mississippi and became
the first legally married interracial couple in the state.

“Activism is my rent for living on the planet.”

While there is no denying that Alice Walker was and remains
an activist and a champion of the causes affecting women and
blacks she also abhors violence. In a time of upheaval when
blows were exchanged, and violence was common in the name of
change she turned to words. Her words as pointed and sharp as
any sword, but nurturing in the way of women since time
immemorial help. Her activism has seemed to uplift a
nation’s black women and change their fates by changing
their perception of themselves and their cultural heritage.

The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker