The heaving sickness past, her nausea gone, her bodily fluids replaced, she felt the lightness of being in the open space around her. Her walls the canyon’s walls, she owned them not at all; her...

Long as I can spell G-o-d I got somebody along.

I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering bout the big things and asking bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But...

They be marching hand in hand, like going to war.

Becauseyou rubbed my shoulderlast nighta poemtraveled downmy arm.

He beat me when you not here, I say.Who do, she say, Albert?Mr ____, I say.I can’t believe it, she say. She sit down on the bench next to me real hard, like she drop.What...

When wehave changed everything we will eat congratulations with our tea.

Even as I hold youI think of you as someone gonefar, far away. Your eyes the colorof pennies in a bowl of dark honeybringing sweet light to someone elseyour black hair slipping through my fingersis...

What she showed me was, Yes, I am Grandmother as she is; there is no separation, really, between us. And that, on this planet, Grandmother Earth, there is no higher authority. That our inseparability is...

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...

Horses make a landscape look beautiful.

When the ax came into the forest the trees said the handle is one of us.

It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That’s how I come to know trees fear man.

Even as I hold you, I am letting you go.

I am so happy. I got love, I got work, I got money, friends and time.

The savage rushing of the river seemed to be inside her head, inside her body. Even when the oarswomen, their guides, were speaking to her, she had the impression she couldn’t quite hear them because...

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.