The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.

The most important question in the world is, "Why is the child crying?"

Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they're still beautiful.

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.

Look closely at the present you are constructing: it should look like the future you are dreaming.

Hard times require furious dancing. Each of us is proof.

You don't always have to be doing something. You can just be, and that's plenty.

The quietly pacifist peaceful always die to make room for men who shout.

Activism is my rent for living on the planet.

Time moves slowly, but passes quickly.

Anything we love can be saved.

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.

All History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world.

To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.

Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.

Helped are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception and realize a partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful.

Whenever you are creating beauty around you, you are restoring your own soul.

Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don't even recognize that growth is happening.

The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one's people that has not previously been taken into account.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

We are the ones we have been waiting for.

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.

I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.

In search of my mother's garden, I found my own.

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.

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.

The nature of this flower is to bloom.

I'm for women choosing whatever they want to do but they have to really know what they are doing.

War contributes greatly to global warming, which shouldn't surprise us. All those bombs going off, all those rockets, all those planes and helicopters. All that fuel of various kinds being used.

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.

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.

What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears.

It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.

People tend to think that life really does progress for everyone eventually, that people progress, but actually only some people progress.

The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate.

How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.

Even as I hold you, I am letting you go.

Resistance is the secret of joy!

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical means, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.

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.

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.

Sometimes, reading a book is a way of making a friend.

Every small positive change we can make in ourselves repays us in confidence in the future.

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.

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.

I cry so much less than I used to. I used to be one of the most teary people.

I think that indigenous women's wisdom is crucial. So much of the care of the Earth has come from the mothers.

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.