In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens Quotes

“Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.”
― Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

“(a womanist)

3. Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself. Regardless.”
― Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

“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. Or who belittles in any fashion the gifts you labor so to bring into the world.”
― Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Prose

“I've found, in my own writing, that a little hatred, keenly directed, is a useful thing.”
― Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

“Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week. ”
― Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

“Writing poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before.”
― Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

“For you will find, as women have found through the ages, that changing the world requires a lot of free time. Requires a lot of mobility. Requires money, and, as Virginia Woolf put it so well, “a room of one’s own,” preferably one with a key and a lock. Which means that women must be prepared to think for themselves, which means, undoubtedly, trouble with boyfriends, lovers, and husbands, which means all kinds of heartache and misery, and times when you will wonder if independence, freedom of thought, or your own work is worth it all. We must believe that it is. For the world is not good enough; we must make it better.”
― alice walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

“We are a people. A people do not throw their geniuses away. And if they are thrown away, it is our duty as artists and as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children, and, if necessary, bone by bone.”
― Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Prose

“there was no sympathy for struggle that ended in defeat. Which meant there was no sympathy for struggle itself—only for “winning.”
― Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Prose

“For several years, while I searched for, found, and studied black women writers, I deliberately shut O'Connor out, feeling almost ashamed that she had reached me first. And yet, even when I no longer read her, I missed her, and realized that though the rest of America might not mind, having endured it so long, I would never be satisfied with a segregated literature. I would have to read Zora Hurston and Flannery O'Connor, Nella Larsen and Carson McCullers, Jean Toomer and William Faulkner, before I could begin to feel well read at all.”
― Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

“Without money of one’s own in a capitalist society, there is no such thing as independence.”
― Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Prose

“subservience of any kind is death to the spirit.”
― Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Prose

“When Toni Morrison said she writes the kind of books she wants to read, she was acknowledging the fact that in a society in which “accepted literature” is so often sexist and racist and otherwise irrelevant or offensive to so many lives, she must do the work of two. She must be her own model as well as the artist attending, creating, learning from, realizing the model, which is to say, herself.”
― Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Prose

“We do it because we care. We care that Vincent Van Gogh mutilated his ear. We care that behind a pile of manure in the yard he destroyed his life. We care that Scott Joplin's music lives! We care because we know this: the life we save is our own.”
― Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

“Part of what existence means to me is knowing the difference between what I am now and what I was then. It is being capable of looking after myself intellectually as well as financially. It is being able to tell when I am being wronged and by whom. It means being awake to protect myself and the ones I love. It means being a part of the world community, and being alert to which part it is that I have joined, and knowing how to change to another part if that part does not suit me. To know is to exist: to exist is to be involved, to move about, to see the world with my own eyes. This, at least, the Movement has given me.”
― Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Prose

“{T}here is a point at which even grief feels absurd. And at this point, laughter gushes up to retrieve sanity.”
― Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

“What is always needed in the appreciation of art, or life, is the larger perspective. Connections made, or at least attempted, where none existed before, the straining to encompass in one's glance at the varied world the common thread, the unifying theme through immense diversity, a fearlessness of growth, of search, of looking, that enlarges the private and the public world. And yet, in our particular society, it is the narrowed and narrowing view of life that often wins”
― Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

“This was my first indication of the quality I feel is most characteristic of Zora’s work: racial health; a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings, a sense that is lacking in so much black writing and literature.”
― Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Prose

“I believe that the truth of any subject only comes when all sides of the story are put together.”
― Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

“She saw poetry where other writers merely saw failure to cope with English.”
― Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Prose

“The real revolution is always concerned with the least glamorous stuff. With raising a reading level from second grade to third. With simplifying history and writing it down (or reciting it) for the old folks. With helping illiterates fill out a food-stamps form - for they must eat, revolution or not.”
― Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

“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. Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength—in search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.”
― Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

“However, the young person leaving college today, especially if she is a woman, must consider the possibility that her best offerings will be considered a nuisance to the men who also occupy her field. And then, having considered this, she would do well to make her mind to fight whoever would stifle her growth with as much courage and tenacity as Mrs. Hudson fights the Klan. If she is black and coming out into the world she must be doubly armed, doubly prepared. Because for her there is not simply a new world to be gained, there is an old world there must be reclaimed.”
― Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

“Then she added thoughtfully, “And that old woman that turned me off so short got down so bad in the end that she was walking on two sticks.” And I knew she was thinking, though she never said it: Here I am today, my eight children healthy and grown and three of them in college and me with hardly a sick day for years. Ain’t Jesus wonderful?”
― Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Prose

“In that story I gathered up the historical and psychological threads of the life my ancestors lived, and in the writing of it I felt joy and strength and my own continuity. I had that wonderful feeling writers get sometimes, not very often, of being with a great many people, ancient spirits, all very happy to see me consulting and acknowledging them, and eager to let me know, through the joy of their presence, that, indeed, I am not alone.”
― Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Prose

“Several months ago, when Israel “annexed” the Golan Heights, a Jewish friend of mine visited that country. Upon his return he explained that Israel needed that land to protect itself from the possibility of enemy shells, apparently lobbed off its cliffs, into Israel. “But doesn’t that land belong to people?” I asked. “They’re not doing anything with it,” he replied. I thought: I have a backyard I’m not ‘doing anything with.’ Does that give you the right to take it?”
― Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Prose

“People who think nonviolence is easy don't realize that it's a spiritual discipline that requires a great deal of strength, growth, and purging of the self so that one can overcome almost any obstacle for the good of all without being concerned about one's own welfare.”
― Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

“I also began to understand how alone woman is, because of her body.”
― alice walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

“That summer marked the beginning of a realization that I could never live happily in Africa--or anywhere else--until I could live freely in Mississippi.”
― Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

“Our mothers and grandmothers, some of them: moving to music not yet written. And they waited. They waited for a day when the unknown thing that was in them would be made known; but guessed somehow in their darkness, that on the day of their revelation they would be long dead.… But this is not the end of the story, for all the young women—our mothers and grandmothers, ourselves—have not perished in the wilderness. And if we ask ourselves why, and search for and find the answer, we will know beyond all efforts to erase it from our minds, just exactly who, and of what, we black American women are.”
― Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose