Alice Walker Quotes

Do not tell everyone your story. You will only end up feeling more rejected. People cannot give you what you long for in your heart. The more you expect from people's response to your experience of abandonment, the more you will feel exposed to ridicule.

I can be hurt, she said, only by people I respect.

I stopped reading reviews about my own movies. I read stuff about other people's movies.

Sometimes I don't like people. And, you know, it doesn't bother me. The hard ones are when you really like somebody, really respect somebody and they make a mistake.

The desire to please other people is a potent way to distract yourself from what you are feeling.

People love talking, and I have never been a huge talker. I carry on an inner monologue, but the words often don't reach my lips.

Never, ever allow yourself to feel. Feelings kill.

It's not fun to keep secrets, but sometimes you have to do it to protect yourself. And to protect people around you. - Meredith, p112

People can portray me anyway they want because I don’t give a damn… But don’t you analyze me and don’t you tell me what I am until you get close enough to understand what I am. Then you can make an analysis of me. But don’t you dare do it until then.

I definitely don't read any tabloids. You really have to find a way to separate the words of people you respect - stranger or not, but respectful content, positive or negative - and people who are just in pain and projecting their own sh*t onto you.

When a gay person turns his back on you, it is anything but an insult; it's an invitation.

Don't badger people without children into admitting the secret desire for children you're sure they have to you! Don't badger anyone! Leave the badgering to the badgers.

For an impenetrable shield, stand inside yourself

Self confidence is the ability to exercise restraint in the face of disrespect and still show respect in response.

Deference often shrinks and withers as much upon the approach of intimacy as the sensitive plant does upon the touch of one's finger.

People have the right to think and say whatever they want to. But you have the right not to take it to heart, and not to react.

I don't ever be trippin off of what ain't mine.

If someone is being unkind or petty or jealous or distant or weird, you don't have to take it in. You don't have to turn it into a big psychodrama about your worth. That behavior so often is not even about you. Don't own other people's crap.

If you work with love and intelligence, you develop a kind of armour against people's opinions, just because of the sincerity of your love for nature and art. Nature is also severe and, to put it that way, hard, but never deceives and always helps you to move forward.

I'm afraid when too many people know too much about you, it actually makes us all a lot more boring because you're afraid to express yourself.

I was with a real jerk after the first heartbreak, and once I did the prerequisite eating an entire cake and singing "All By Myself" in the shower, I realized that people treat you badly when you let them, and that I had to respect myself and not let anyone else treat me that way again. If someone really loves you, they are your biggest champion, not your biggest detractor.

When we really see other people as they are without taking it personally, we can never be hurt by what they say or do.

You know you have that zealousness of the young person that feels like you can go out and do it all. You know you save the world, save your gente, save women and before you know it if you try to do that you will burn out very quickly. My feeling is that I always think that and my advice to young people regardless of what times in these decades we've been living in there's always work to be done. The point is what can you do personally that you can live with so that you can get up the next morning and have the strength to start it all over again.

What foolsmiddle-classgirls are to expect other people to respect the same gods as themselves and E M Forster.

It is against the law to permit weak people to steal your strength. Never permit it.