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.

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...