Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance and holler, just trying to be loved.
Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.
Surely the earth can be savedby all the peoplewho insiston love.
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.
I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.
But it ain’t easy, trying to do without God even if you know he ain’t there, trying to do without him is a strain
And I don’t believe you dead. How can you be dead if I still feel you? Maybe, like God, you changed into something different that I’ll have to speak to in a different way, but you not dead to me Nettie. And never will you be.
But I don’t know how to fight. All I know how to do is stay alive.
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.
If you’re silent for a long time, people just arrive in your mind.
Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.
I’ve found, in my own writing, that a little hatred, keenly directed, is a useful thing.
The life of my people is to remember forever; each head granary is full. The life of your people is to forget: your thing granaries (“museums”), and not yourselves, are full.
No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.
Men make war to get attention. All killing is an expression of self-hate.
The mountain of despair has dwindled, and the stone of hope has size and shape, and can be fondled by the eyes and by the hand. But freedom has always been an elusive tease, and in the very act of grabbing for it one can become shackled.
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.
Now. Is this life or not?I be so calm.If she come, I be happy. If she don’t, I be content.And then I figure this the lesson I was suppose to learn.
And I try to teach my heart not to want nothing it can’t have.
I don’t know who tried to teach him what to do in the bedroom, but it must have been a furniture salesman.
Shug say, What, too shamefaced to put singing and dancing and fucking together? She laugh. That’s the reason they call what us sing the devil’s music. Devils love to fuck.
Dear Nettie, I don’t write to God no more, I write to you.
All her young life she has tried to please her father, never quite realizing that, as a girl, she never could.
Sofia the kind of woman no matter what she have in her hand she make it look like a weapon.
He say, Celie, tell me the truth. You don’t like me cause I’m a man?I blow my nose. take off they pants, I say, and men look like frogs to me. No matter how you kiss ’em, as far as I’m concern, frogs is what they stay.
A girl is nothing to herself; only to her husband can she become something. What can she become? I asked. Why, she said, the mother of his children. But I am not the mother of anybody’s children, I said, and I am something.
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.
Why should the killers of the world be “the future” and not us?
What that song? I ast. Sound low down dirty to me. Like what the preacher tells you its sin to hear. Not to mention sing.She hum a little more. Something come to me, she say. Something I made up. Something you help scratch out my head.
I live a very secluded life, a very contemplative life and a very meditative one. That is my ideal life.
But what was good tween us must have been nothing but bodies, she say. Cause I don’t know the Albert that don’t dance, can’t hardly laugh, never talk bout nothing, beat you and hid your sister Nettie’s letters. Who he?
Anyhow, I say, the God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgitful, and lowdown.
The three wealthiest people in the world own more than the GDP of forty-eight countries!
Peace”: the fruit of justice done especially to the Self.
Every small positive change we make in ourselves repays us in confidence in the future.
You think you can avoid [pain,] but you actually can’t. If you do, you just get sicker, or you feel more pain. But if you can speak it, if you can write it, if you can paint it, it is very healing.
What the mind doesn’t understand, it worships or fears.
Once us feel loved by God, us do the best us can to please him with what us like.
He beat me when you not here, I say.Who do, she say, Albert?Mr ____, I say.I can’t believe it, she say. She sit down on the bench next to me real hard, like she drop.What he beat you for? she ast.For being me and not you.
Those in power must spend a lot of their time laughing at us.
I believe that the truth of any subject only comes when all sides of the story are put together.
When the ax came into the forest the trees said the handle is one of us.
It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That’s how I come to know trees fear man.
Hard times’ is a phrase the English love to use, when speaking of Africa. And it is easy to forget that Africa’s ‘hard times’ were made harder by them.
First time I got the full sight of Shug Avery long black body with it black plum nipples, look like her mouth, I thought I had turned into a man
She got a long pointed nose and big fleshy mouth. Lips look like black plum. Eyes big, glossy. Feverish. And mean. Like, sick as she is, if a snake cross her path, she kill it
It didn’t take long to realize I didn’t hardly know nothing. And that if you ast yourself why you black or a man or a woman or a bush it don’t mean nothing if you don’t ast why you here, period
The crushed teapot in the rubbish of the bulldozed house will sing in your ears forever.
I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.
I am an expression of the divine, just like a peach is, just like a fish is.
All these faces look happy enough, say Shug. Big and beefy. Eyes clear and innocent, like they don’t know them other crooks on the front page. But they the same folks, she say.
I have learned not to worry about love but to honor its coming with all my heart.
Women have to summon up courage to fulfill dormant dreams.
Is solace anywhere more comforting than in the arms of sisters?
No person is your friend who demands your silence or denies your right to grow.
The experience of God or in any case the possibility of experiencing God is innate.
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.
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.
Our mothers and our grandmothers some of them: moving to music not yet written.
If you want to have a life that is worth living, a life that expresses your deepest feelings and emotions and cares and dreams, you have to fight for it.
Women have to summon up courage to fulfill dormant dreams.
I think ‘The Color Purple’ is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the need for connection around the globe.
In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.
I understood at a very early age that in nature, I felt everything I should feel in church but never did. Walking in the woods, I felt in touch with the universe and with the spirit of the universe.
Howard Zinn was magical as a teacher. Witty, irreverent, and wise, he loved what he was teaching and clearly wanted his students to love it, also.
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.
In South Korea, they believe that when you turn 60, you’ve become a baby again and the rest of your life should be totally about joy and happiness, and people should leave you alone, and I just think that that’s the height of intelligence.
Don’t wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you’ve got to make yourself.
If we want to fight people in the world, we should fight them with pillows – pillows stuffed with food, medicine, music… That would be so much cheaper than bombs.
I don’t call myself a Buddhist. I’m a free spirit. I believe I’m here on earth to admire and enjoy it that’s my religion.
‘Thank you’ is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.
Life is abundant, and life is beautiful. And it’s a good place that we’re all in, you know, on this earth, if we take care of it.
All History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world.
Propaganda is amazing. People can be led to believe anything.
This is a wonderful planet, and it is being completely destroyed by people who have too much money and power and no empathy.
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.
The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate.
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.
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.
The infinite faith I have in people’s ability to understand anything that makes sense has always been justified, finally, by their behavior.
I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.
I made my first white women friends in college; they loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered.
Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.
How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.
Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.
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.
You know how big love is? Love is big. love can hold anger love can even hold hatred.
The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one’s people that has not previously been taken into account.
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.