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Celebrating American Novelist Alice Walker with 10 of Her Best Quotes

Discover writer and social activist Alice Walker’s best quotes that continue to inspire today.
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A Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Alice Walker's novels, short stories, and poems offer great insight into the treatment of African-American culture in the 20th century. Considered one of the most prominent intellectuals in the world, Walker had been interested in the Civil Rights movement from a very young age, which had a profound influence on her as both an activist and author. Her books, most notably The Color Purple from 1982—for which she won the National Book Award for hardcover fiction and became the first woman of color awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction—focus particularly on the struggles of Black people, especially women, and their lives in a racist, sexist, and violent society. She often drew on her personal experiences for her writing, as she grew up in the segregated South and fought for racial justice.

Walker’s work is still as relevant today, and an everlasting point of reference for African-American history. In honor of the author's 77th birthday, L’OFFICIEL presents 10 inspirational quotes from Walker’s life as a writer, activist, and intellectual that prove her unparalleled reputation.

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"No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow."
"We are the ones we have been waiting for."
"Activism is my rent for living on the planet."
"I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it."
"Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be."
"Hard times require furious dancing. Each of us is proof."
"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..."
"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any."
"What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears."
"Some people don't understand that it is the nature of the eye to have seen forever, and the nature of the mind to recall anything that was ever known."

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