Alice Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia (1944). She grew up the youngest of eight children. She grew up listening to the women in her family telling stories about lynching and adultery and struggling to survive. Her parents were sharecroppers who made about $300 a year. Walker would have been spent most of her time helping out in the fields, but when she was four years old a school teacher noticed her and got her new clothes and made sure she went to school every day.
When she was eight years old, her brother shot her in the eye with a BB gun, and a scar covered that eye for six years. She felt like an outcast, and began spending most of her free time alone, hiding in the farm fields, and she began writing in a journal. She said, "I think I started writing just to keep from being so lonely."
She graduated first in her class from high school, but it was because of her partial blindness that she was given a college scholarship for disabled students. Her friends and family helped pay for the $75 dollar bus ticket to Atlanta.
She transferred to Sara Lawrence College, and then took a trip to Africa. When she got back to college she was pregnant and seriously considering suicide. She chose to get an abortion, and then began writing dozens of poems over the course of a week, barely eating or sleeping, and she shoved all the poems under the door of her poetry teacher Muriel Rukeyser. Rukeyser showed the poems to her agent, and they were eventually published as Alice Walker's first book Once (1968).
Walker went on to write several more books of poetry and fiction, none of which got much attention, and then she decided to try writing a novel in the voice of a woman like one of the women she grew up listening to as a child. She started writing letters in that voice, addressed to God, and those letters eventually grew into her novel The Color Purple (1982), which spent more than 25 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and went on to win both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Walker was the first black woman ever to receive the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
The Color Purple begins, "Dear God, I am fourteen years old. I have always been a good girl. Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me."
Walker has gone on to write many other novels. Her next novel, Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, will come out this spring.
*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.
*Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me.
*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.
*Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.
*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.
*How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.
*I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.
*I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.
*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'm always amazed that people will actually choose to sit in front of the television and just be savaged by stuff that belittles their intelligence.
*In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they're still beautiful.
*In search of my mother's garden, I found my own.
*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.
*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.
*It seems our fate to be incorrect (look where we live, for example), and in our incorrectness stand.
*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 better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.
*Never be the only one, except, possibly, in your own home.
*No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.
*Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.
*People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.
*Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors.
*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.
*The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate.
*The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one's people that has not previously been taken into account.
*The most important question in the world is, 'Why is the child crying?'
*The quietly pacifist peaceful always die to make room for men who shout.
*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?
*Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.
*Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.
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