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

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

But what was good tween us must have been nothing but bodies, she say. Cause I don’t know the Albert that don’t dance, can’t hardly laugh, never talk bout nothing, beat you and hid your...

This is the true wine of astonishment: “We are not over when we think we are.

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...

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.

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....

You telling me God love you, and you ain’t never done nothing for him? I mean, not go to church, sing in the choir, feed the preacher and all like that?But if God love me,...

He say, Celie, tell me the truth. You don’t like me cause I’m a man?I blow my nose. take off they pants, I say, and men look like frogs to me. No matter how you...

It didn’t take long to realize I didn’t hardly know nothing. And that if you ast yourself why you black or a man or a woman or a bush it don’t mean nothing if you...

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

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....

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

You are all talking a bit too much, said Armando, who had cautioned them from the beginning to stay out of popular culture and in their own interior worlds.When you are caught up in the...

Shug say, What, too shamefaced to put singing and dancing and fucking together? She laugh. That’s the reason they call what us sing the devil’s music. Devils love to fuck.

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...

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...

And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see – or like a sealed letter they...

When I was a child I read books for entertainment and information; I now think of books as lifeboats.

look in a man’s face” is a brazen thing to do. They look instead at his feet or his knees.

Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance and holler, just trying to be loved.

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...

The crushed teapot in the rubbish of the bulldozed house will sing in your ears forever.

Here’s the thing, say Shug. The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And...

When it is all too much; when the news is so bad meditation itself feels useless, and a single life feels too small a stone to offer on the altar of Peace, find a Human...

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.

Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors.

Expect nothing. Live frugallyOn surprise.become a strangerTo need of pityOr, if compassion be freelyGiven outTake only enoughStop short of urge to pleadThen purge away the need.Wish for nothing largerThan your own small heartOr greater than...

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...

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

But it ain’t easy, trying to do without God even if you know he ain’t there, trying to do without him is a strain

I live a very secluded life, a very contemplative life and a very meditative one. That is my ideal life.

Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never...

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

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

If you’re silent for a long time, people just arrive in your mind.

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...

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

First time I got the full sight of Shug Avery long black body with it black plum nipples, look like her mouth, I thought I had turned into a man

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

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

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

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

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

She got a long pointed nose and big fleshy mouth. Lips look like black plum. Eyes big, glossy. Feverish. And mean. Like, sick as she is, if a snake cross her path, she kill it

A girl is nothing to herself; only to her husband can she become something. What can she become? I asked. Why, she said, the mother of his children. But I am not the mother of...

Listen, God love everything you love – and a mess of stuff you don’t. But more than anything else, God love admiration.You saying God vain? I ast.Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share...

A writer’s heart, a poet’s heart, an artist’s heart, a musician’s heart is always breaking. It is through that broken window that we see the world…

I’ve found, in my own writing, that a little hatred, keenly directed, is a useful thing.

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