The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate.

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they're still beautiful.

I understood at a very early age that in nature, I felt everything I should feel in church but never did. Walking in the woods, I felt in touch with the universe and with the spirit of the universe.

I just think cities are unnatural, basically. I know there are people who live happily in them, and I have cities that I love, too. But it's a disaster that we have moved so far from nature.

I try to teach my heart not to want things it can't have.

I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.

In search of my mother's garden, I found my own.

Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.

I love the natural world - it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved.

I love us so incredibly, insanely deeply; it's almost unbearable to see what we do to ourselves.

I think 'The Color Purple' is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the need for connection around the globe.

You bring children into the world. You love them with heart and soul.

I believe you mother everybody, not in a cloying, hovering way, but taking care of what is around you.

What's really hard is that you could care a lot for someone and not want to live with him anymore.

The fact is that when you do something from your heart, you leave a heart print.

My life is not to be somebody else's impact - you know what I mean?

Well, I think indigenous peoples have ways of living on the Earth that they've had forever. And they've been overrun by organized religion, which has had a lot of money and power.

People tend to think that life really does progress for everyone eventually, that people progress, but actually only some people progress. The rest of the people don't.

I see children, all children, as humanity's most precious resource, because it will be to them that the care of the planet will always be left.

It's so clear that you have to cherish everyone. I think that's what I get from these older black women, that every soul is to be cherished, that every flower Is to bloom.

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.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

It no longer bothers me that I may be constantly searching for father figures; by this time, I have found several and dearly enjoyed knowing them all.

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

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

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 for.

If you want to have a life that is worth living, a life that expresses your deepest feelings and emotions and cares and dreams, you have to fight for it.

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

There's an ecstatic side to writing. It's like jazz. It just has a life.

It's very hard for our parents who see us enter a world that they can't imagine.

This is a wonderful planet, and it is being completely destroyed by people who have too much money and power and no empathy.

I can be almost terminally grief-stricken because things are so dire, but at the same time, there's a real lightheartedness about just the recoverability of life, of how things change, how they're not the same, ever again.

My work is about my life, and what I want to do with it.

Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.

Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?

I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to.

Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors.

Never be the only one, except, possibly, in your own home.

For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle; and one faces down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged.

The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one's people that has not previously been taken into account.

All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.

Helped are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception and realize a partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful.

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

There are those who believe Black people possess the secret of joy and that it is this that will sustain them through any spiritual or moral or physical devastation.

The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn't want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass.

To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.

Fiction is such a world of freedom, it's wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.

As an elder of the Americas and of the rest of the planet, it is my responsibility to care for and protect, to the best of my ability, the young.

You know, one race will not be a survivor if the other one dies, and that's something that we should think about.

At one point I learned transcendental meditation. This was 30-something years ago. It took me back to the way that I naturally was as a child growing up way in the country, rarely seeing people. I was in that state of oneness with creation and it was as if I didn't exist except as a part of everything.