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.

Nobody is superior, nobody is inferior, but nobody is equal either. People are simply unique, incomparable. You are you. I am I.

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

To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don’t need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself.

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.

Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.

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.

When you do something noble and beautiful and nobody noticed, do not be sad. For the sun every morning is a beautiful spectacle and yet most of the audience still sleeps.

Beauty? To me it is a word without sense because I do not know where its meaning comes from nor where it leads to.

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.

I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.

The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with joy are goodness, beauty, and truth. 

Our task must be to free ourselves… by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and it’s beauty.

The most beautiful make-up of a woman is passion. But cosmetics are easier to buy.

Don’t let them say you ain’t beautiful. They can all get fucked, just stay true to you.

There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion.

The best and most beautiful things in life cannot be seen, not touched, but are felt in the heart.

Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see a shadow.

A flower blossoms for its own joy.

Beauty is a delightful prejudice.

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?

Poetry moves heaven and earth.

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.