Famous Quotations

Below is a short list of Alice Walker’s famous and sometimes controversial quotations from other novels, short stories and collections of poetry she has written. The function of this, like the biography, is to enlighten you as to what sort of a person Walker is and was as well as her perspective on sex and race issues.

The citations are arranged in chronological order:

"A tall man
Without clothes
Beautiful
Like a statue
Up close
His eyes
Are running
Sores"
From Karamojans in Once [1968]

"It seems our fate to be incorrect (look where we live, for example), and in our incorrectness stand."
From Interview in Interviews with Black Writers [1973], edited by John O’Brien^†

"How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers' names."
From the article A Letter to the Editor, featured in Ms. magazine [1974]^†

"The original "crime" of "niggers" and lesbians is that they prefer themselves."
From the article Breaking Chains and Encouraging Life [1980] featured in Ms. magazine

"The good news may be that Nature is phasing out the white man, but the bad news is that's who She thinks we all are."
From the article Nuclear Madness: What You Can Do featured in Black Scholar magazine [1982]

"Womanist is to feminist as purple to lavender."
From In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose [1983]

"As for those who think the Arab world promises freedom, the briefest study of its routine traditional treatment of blacks (slavery) and women (purdah) will provide relief from all illusion. If Malcolm X had been a black woman his last message to the world would have been entirely different. The brotherhood of Moslem men-all colors-may exist there, but part of the glue that holds them together is the thorough suppression of women."
From In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose [1983]

"To me, the black black woman is our essential mother - the blacker she is the more us she is - and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people."
From In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose [1983]

"I’m saying that if you mutilate 100 million women and make it so hard for them to give birth that many of them will die trying or their children will be born deformed or crippled, how can you expect the continent to be healthy."
Alice Walker, speaking about female circumcision with Charles Whitaker in the article Color Purple Author Confronts Her Critics about Her Provocative New Book [Possessing the Secret of Joy, 1992]

"There are those who believe Black people possess the secret of joy and that it is this that will sustain them through any spiritual or moral or physical devastation."
From Possessing the Secret of Joy [1992], Epigraph

"They circumcised women, little girls, in Jesus's time. Did he know? Did the subject anger or embarrass him? Did the early church erase the record? Jesus himself was circumcised; perhaps he thought only the cutting done to him was done to women, and therefore, since he survived, it was all right."
From Possessing the Secret of Joy [1992], page 21

"'Even though I write books and believe very much in books, the truth is, as you all know, we have become a fairly illiterate culture’ she said. ‘In order to communicate real things that you need to say to people, you also need to think of something visual and I do this with films’"
Alice Walker, talking about the filming of The Color Purple [1985] with Julie Mills in an article entitled Walker Shares Personal Moments [1996]

^†: All of the articles featured in this document from Ms. magazine and the interview edited by John O’Brien were later reprinted in Walker’s novel, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose [1983].

Compiled and written by Matthew Kane [2001]

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