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In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose QUOTES

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " 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

3 " 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

4 " 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

5 " 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

6 " 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

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

― Alice Walker , In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

8 " 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

9 " 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

10 " 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: Womanist Prose

11 " 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

12 " 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: Womanist Prose

13 " subservience of any kind is death to the spirit. "

― Alice Walker , In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

14 " 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: Womanist Prose

15 " 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: Womanist Prose

16 " 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: Womanist Prose

17 " 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: Womanist Prose

18 " 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: Womanist Prose

19 " 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: Womanist Prose

20 " 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: Womanist Prose