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Quote by Alice Walker

Work

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

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Author

Alice Walker
Alice Walker

Alice Walker is a renowned American author born on February 9, 1944. Her works are known for their profound social criticism and feminist ideas, with notable titles including 'The Color Purple' and 'Beloved'. more

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“Be careful of those who try to convince you that they are good people and everyone is evil. Be very cautious of those individuals who attempt to position themselves as inherently virtuous while portraying everyone else as bad or malicious. Such individuals may intentionally undermine or sabotage others in order to preserve the appearance of being morally superior. These behaviors represent some of the most concerning human tendencies. They obscure the truth, rely on deception, and frequently speak negatively about others as a mechanism to deflect attention from their own character and actions.”

“I was the sort of beautiful that women knew they could never truly emulate. Men knew they would never even get close to a woman like me. Ruby was the elegant, aloof sort of beauty. Ruby was cool. Ruby was chic. But Celia was the sort of beautiful that felt as if you could hold it in your hands, like if you played your cards right, you might just get to marry a girl like Celia St. James.”

“I like to think of the houses I build as having their own personalities. Oh, there's the people who are their custodians to consider, of course, a symbiosis in the relationship between the house and its owner, but sometimes these grand estates have a way of forcing their residents to their will, of bending and shaping the trajectory of their lives. After all, when our bones turn to dust, these wall will still stand.”

“The people I love will mourn me, but I won't be around to commiserate. I become gloomy thinking of insensate things I will leave behind. My survivors will cram into plastic bags the tchotchkes I have lived with, expanding a landfill. I needn’t worry about my Andy Warhols. I fret over the striped stone that my daughter picked up at the pond, or my father’s desk lamp from college, or a miniature wooden milk wagon from the family dairy. My mother approaching ninety feared that we would junk the Hummel figurines that decorated her mantelpiece, kitsch porcelain dolls popular from the forties to the sixties. Thus, a box of them rests in my daughter’s attic. More important to me is this house, which my great-grandfather moved to in 1865—the family place for almost a century and a half. In the back chamber the generations stored everything broken or useless, because no one knew when they might come in handy. My kids and grandkids don’t want to live in rural isolation—why should they?—but it’s melancholy to think of the house emptied out. Better it should burn down.”