The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn't want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass.
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.
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.
Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.
The most important question in the world is, 'Why is the child crying?'
America is not nearly done. We're only in the beginning. Who knows who we will be? Who knows... what color we will be? It is all something that, maybe, our descendants - if they survive that long - will see.
The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.
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.
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?
I cry so much less than I used to. I used to be one of the most teary people.
Well, I think indigenous peoples have ways of living on the Earth that they've had forever. And they've been overrun by organized religion, which has had a lot of money and power.
Fiction is such a world of freedom, it's wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.
All History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world.
I'm not lesbian; I'm not bisexual; I'm not straight. I'm just curious.
I know from having had a child, and from having been a child myself, that children will copy you.
My parents taught me service - not by saying, but by doing. That was my culture, the culture of my family.
I met Howard Zinn in 1961, my first year at Spelman College in Atlanta. He was the tall, rangy, good-looking professor that many of the girls at Spelman swooned over.
I cannot claim to have had a hard time publishing.
What's really hard is that you could care a lot for someone and not want to live with him anymore.
I love the women's movement, and I never thought of it as belonging to any particular segment of the population.
Human beings may well be unable to break free of the dictatorship of greed that spreads like a miasma over the world, but no longer will we be an inarticulate and ignorant humanity, confused by our enslavement to superior cruelty and weaponry.
I was distressed that after 9/11, when the United States was attacked by terrorists, the United States' response was to attack Afghanistan, where some of the terrorists had been.
I've always felt quite singular, even as a child. That I must stay on track to keep my purpose.
I'm not convinced that women have the education or the sense of their own history enough or that they understand the cruelty of which men are capable and the delight that many men will take in seeing you choose to chain yourself - then they get to say 'See, you did it yourself.'
Most damage that others do us is out of fear, humiliation and pain. Those feelings occur in all of us, not just in those of us who profess a certain religious or racial devotion.
It's not possible to stop love.
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.
Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week.
It's an awful feeling to write something that you feel is really important... and to feel that you're being published by people who really don't get it and/or don't really care.
My family was a poor farming family, and we lived under absolute segregation.
Clearly older women and especially older women who have led an active life or elder women who successfully maneuver through their own family life have so much to teach us about sharing, patience, and wisdom.
It is natural to want to have a future.
I try to teach my heart not to want things it can't have.
We must begin seeing other creatures as equal. Existence makes us all equal.
Since the time of the witch burnings, the grandmothers and the healers and the midwives have been systematically targeted. And burned at the stake for hundreds of years, decimating whole communities.
How long will it take the citizens of the United States, one wonders, to recognize that the house their country bombed in Iraq is the same one they were living in until it was foreclosed?