Alice Malsenior Walker (b.1944) is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, and social activist. She is celebrated for her stories about black women who realize heroic prominence within the confines of ordinary day-to-day lives. Walker has also written and spoken out for human rights and ecological justice globally.
Born into a family of sharecroppers in Eatonville, Georgia, and educated at Spelman College, Atlanta, and Sarah Lawrence College, New York City, Walker worked in voter registration campaigns before becoming a teacher and a lecturer.
Walker’s essay In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens (1983) is an essential rediscovery of a black female literary and cultural tradition.
Walker is celebrated for novels that explore racial and sexual politics as they affect African-American women. Her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970,) recounts the lives of three generations of a family in rural Georgia; her second, Meridian (1976,) draws on her own experiences of the civil rights movement.
Walker’s third and most famous novel is The Color Purple (1982; film by Steven Spielberg, 1985.) Winner of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize, it portrays in letters the story of two sisters in the cruel, segregated world of the Deep South between the wars.
Walker’s later works include the novels The Temple of My Familiar (1989,) By the Light of My Father’s Smile (1998,) and Now is the Time to Open Your Heart (2004.) Warrior Marks (1993) is a non-fiction book about female genital mutilation.
Walker’s autobiographies are The Same River Twice (1996) and The Chicken Chronicles (2011.) The documentary Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth was released in 2013.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Alice Walker
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.
—Alice Walker
Topics: Criticism
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.
—Alice Walker
Topics: Thinking, Power
In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.
—Alice Walker
Topics: Perfection
The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate.
—Alice Walker
Topics: Faith, God
She say, Celie, 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
Topics: Religion
I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.
—Alice Walker
Topics: Romance, Love, Worry
Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.
—Alice Walker
Topics: Death
Expect nothing, live frugally on surprise.
—Alice Walker
Topics: Expectation, Attitude
How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.
—Alice Walker
Topics: Mothers
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
Topics: Freedom
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.
—Alice Walker
Topics: Revolution
The harm that you do to others is the harm that you do to yourself and you cannot think then that you can cause wars in other parts of the world and destroy people and drone them without this having a terrible impact on your own soul and your own consciousness.
—Alice Walker
It’s so clear that you have to cherish everyone. I think that’s what I get from these older black women, that every soul is to be cherished, that every flower Is to bloom.
—Alice Walker
The little I knew about my own self wouldn’t have filled a thimble!
—Alice Walker
Don’t wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you’ve got to make yourself.
—Alice Walker
Topics: Kindness, Compassion, Life, Knowledge, People, Thought, Success
I’m always amazed that people will actually choose to sit in front of the television and just be savaged by stuff that belittles their intelligence.
—Alice Walker
Topics: Television
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.
—Alice Walker
The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women for men.
—Alice Walker
Topics: Animals
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
Topics: Tolerance
Never be the only one, except, possibly, in your own home.
—Alice Walker
People tend to think that life really does progress for everyone eventually, that people progress, but actually only some people progress. The rest of the people don’t.
—Alice Walker
Topics: Progress
It no longer bothers me that I may be constantly searching for father figures; by this time, I have found several and dearly enjoyed knowing them all.
—Alice Walker
Topics: Fathers
It seems our fate to be incorrect (look where we live, for example), and in our incorrectness stand.
—Alice Walker
Topics: Politics
As long as the Earth can make a spring every year, I can. As long as the Earth can flower and produce nurturing fruit, I can, because I’m the Earth. I won’t give up until the Earth gives up.
—Alice Walker
But please remember, especially in these times of group-think and the right-on chorus, that 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.
—Alice Walker
Topics: Silence, Friendship
Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?
—Alice Walker
Topics: Gardening
The sight of a Black nun strikes their sentimentality; and, as I am unalterably rooted in native ground, they consider me a work of primitive art, housed in a magical color; the incarnation of civilized, anti-heathenism, and the fruit of a triumphing idea.
—Alice Walker
Topics: Religion
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Cynthia Ozick American Novelist, Essayist
Joyce Carol Oates American Novelist
Annie Dillard American Writer
Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
Carol Shields Canadian Author, Academic
John Updike American Author
Rita Mae Brown American Writer, Feminist
Fannie Flagg American Comedian, Novelist
Andre Norton American Science Fiction Writer
Anne Lamott American Novelist