Alice Walker Quotes

I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean. Whenever one door closes I hope one more opens. Promise me that you'll give faith a fighting chance. And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance, I hope you dance.

Whoever we may be, whatever our immediate interest, however much we carry baggage from our past, however much we have been caught by the fashion of cynicism and loss of faith in the capacity of the people, let us err today and say - nothing can stop us now!

...in their millenial and long-lived patience they knew quite well how, in a hundred years, or a thousand years' time, or else, perhaps, tomorrow, in an hour's time, for it was all a gamble, a million to one chance, but all the same there was a chance that if they kept on shaking their chains, one day, some day, the clasps upon the shackles would part.

My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we'll change the world.

Courage to continue comes from deeper sources than outward results.

Never let your head hang down. Never give up and sit down and grieve. Find another way. And don't pray when it rains if you don't pray when the sun shines.

Don't quit. For if you do, you may miss the answer to your prayers.

Real hope is much more than wishful musing. It stiffens, not slackens, the spiritual spine.

But if a few awake, you can't say there is no hope of destroying the iron house.

As long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive.

Let us say with one voice, the words of James Cleveland's great freedom hymn: "I don't feel no ways tired. I come too far from where I started from. Nobody told me that the road would be easy. I don't believe he brought me this far to leave me."

Never let an impossible situation intimidate you. Let it motivate you - to pray more, trust more, expect more.

This wasn't prayer anyway, it was just argument with the gods. Prayer, he suspected as he hoisted himself up and turned for the door, was putting one foot in front of the other. Moving all the same.

I can rise above the humility of my failure with an intense desire to search deeper and a blind faith that some day my sight may pierce through the veils that hide. I know God's face is there if I keep my gaze steady enough.

God, please help us remember that all the darkness in the world cannot snuff out the light of one little candle. Help us to keep lighting our little candles until a mighty torch of justice sweeps our nation and the world.

Closed doors are a test of our faith. Keep moving forward, being your best, living with determination and faith. When you do, you'll see amazing changes all around you.

The answer to our prayer may be the echo of our resolve.

We give up too easily. We give up too soon. We quit praying right before the miracle happens.

My three P's would be pray, pray first. Second, prepare, and then persist.

Things will get easier, people's minds will change, and you should be alive to see it.

My people couldn't have survived slavery without having hope that it would get better. And there's some songs from the 19th and 18th century that say [sings], "By and by, by and by, I will lay down, this heavy load." And I mean, so many songs that spoke of hope and understand it better by and by. Amazing songs. So that the slaves, just knowing that he, she, did not have the right legally to walk within one inch away from where the slave owner dictated, and yet the same person, wrote and sang with fervor, "If the lord wants somebody, here am I, send me." It's amazing.

When you get into a tight place, and everything goes against you till it seems as if you could n't hold on a minute longer, never give up then, for that 's just the place and time that the tide'll turn. Never trust to prayer without using every means in your power, and never use the means without trusting in prayer. Get your evidences of grace by pressing forward to the mark, and not by groping with a lantern after the boundary-lines, - and so, boys, go, and God bless you!

Press bravely onward! - not in vainYour generous trust in human kind;The good which bloodshed could not gainYour peaceful zeal shall find.

The only way you can fail is if you stop praying.

My knees on the ground, dear father, don't let me break, please make me stronger.