"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."

"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."

"Sofia the kind of woman no matter what she have in her hand she make it look like a weapon."

"'Thank you' is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding."

"All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience."

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

"Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week."

"But I don't know how to fight. All I know how to do is stay alive."

"Naw, I say. Mr ____, can tell you, I don't like it at all. What is it to like? He git up on you, heist your nightgown round your waist, plunge in. Most times I pretend I ain't there. He never know the difference. Never ast me how I feel, nothing. Just do his business, get off, go to sleep.She start to laugh. Do his business, she say. Do his business. Why, Miss Celie. You make it sound like he going to the toilet on you.That's what it feel like, I say.She stop laughing."

"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."

"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."

"Peace": the fruit of justice done especially to the Self."

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

"Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 am an expression of the divine, just like a peach is, just like a fish is."

"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."

"You know how big love is? Love is big. love can hold anger love can even hold hatred."

"Propaganda is amazing. People can be led to believe anything."

"I don't know who tried to teach him what to do in the bedroom, but it must have been a furniture salesman."

"There is a way that the men speak to women that reminds me too much of Pa. They listen just long enough to issue instructions. They don't even look at women when women are speaking. They look at the ground and bend their heads toward the ground."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"Man corrupt everything, say Shug. He on your box of grits, in your head, and all over the radio. He try to make you think he everywhere. Soon as you think he everywhere, you think he God. But he ain't. Whenever you trying to pray, and man plop himself on the other end of it, tell him to git lost, say Shug. Conjure up the flowers, wind, water, a big rock."

"Is solace anywhere more comforting than that in the arms of a sister."

"Men make war to get attention. All killing is an expression of self-hate."

"Horses make a landscape look beautiful."

"Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence."

"All her young life she has tried to please her father, never quite realizing that, as a girl, she never could."

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

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

"It is justice and respect that I want the world to dust off and put - without delay, and with tenderness - back on the head of the Palestinian child. It will be imperfect justice and respect because the injustice and disrespect have been so severe. But I believe we are right to try."

"And I try to teach my heart not to want nothing it can't have."

"People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools."

"The more powerful the powerful appear the more invisible they become, said Armando. This used to work differently than now. In the old days it was said that the powerful merged with the divine and the divine was all that one saw. But now the powerful have merged with the shadow, really with death, and when you encounter them they are really hard to see."

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

"Those in power must spend a lot of their time laughing at us."

"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."

"Hope to sin only in the service of waking up."

"Then he say something that really surprise me cause it so thoughtful and common sense. When it come to what folks do together with they bodies, he say, anybody's guess is as good as mine. But when you talk about love I don't have to guess. I have love and I have been love. And I thank God he let me gain understanding enough to know love can't be halted just cause some peoples moan and groan."