Alice Walker
Alice Walker
Alice Malsenior Walkeris an American novelist, short story writer, poet, and activist. She wrote the critically acclaimed novel The Color Purplefor which she won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She also wrote Meridian and The Third Life of Grange Copeland, among other works...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth9 February 1944
CityEatonton, GA
CountryUnited States of America
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At Sarah Lawrence, I realized that everybody was already what they were going to be. The painters were painting, the writers writing, the dancers dancing. And nobody wore any makeup. The art was uppermost.
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For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn't poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.
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I think that all people who feel that there is injustice in the world anywhere should learn as much of it as they can bear. That is our duty.
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We must, all of us, learn actually not to have enemies, but only confused adversaries who are ourselves in disguise.
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In the summer of 1966, I went to Mississippi to be in the heart of the civil-rights movement, helping people who had been thrown off the farms or taken off the welfare roles for registering to vote. While working there, I met the civil-rights lawyer I later married - we became an interracial couple.
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Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.
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One of the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement is that when you travel through the South today, you do not feel overwhelmed by a residue of grievance and hate.
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Many readers fail to realize this, but 'The Color Purple' is a theological text. It is about the reclamation of one's original God: the earth and nature.
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As long as the people don't fear the truth, there is hope. For once they fear it, the one who tells it doesn't stand a chance. And today, truth is still beautiful... but so frightening.
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When I joined the freedom movement in Mississippi in my early 20s, it was to come to the aid of sharecroppers, like my parents, who had been thrown off the land they'd always known - the plantations - because they attempted to exercise their 'democratic' right to vote.
anger hold love
You know how big love is? Love is big. love can hold anger; love can even hold hatred.
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June Jordan, who died of cancer in 2002, was a brilliant, fierce, radical, and frequently furious poet. We were friends for thirty years. Not once in that time did she step back from what was transpiring politically and morally in the world. She spoke up, and led her students, whom she adored, to do the same.
hard
What's really hard is that you could care a lot for someone and not want to live with him anymore.
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There are thousands of Palestinians in prison virtually for no reason.