I love children say Sofia. But all the colored women that say they love yours is lying. They don't love Reynolds Stanley any more than I do. But if you so badly raise as to ast 'em, what you expect th...
His little whistle sound like it lost way down a jar, and the jar in the bottom of the creek. P. 64
As others might prepare for an exam whose subject matter is unknown to them, so I must study, cram, for every conversation with my folks.
A girl is nothing to herself; only to her husband can she become something. What can she become? I asked. Why, she said, the mother of his children. But I am not the mother of anybody's children, I sa...
The world has changed: it did not change without your prayers without your faith without your determination to believe in liberation and kindness; without your dancing through the years that had no be...
No person is your friend (or kin) who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow and be perceived as fully blossomed as you were intended. Or who belittles in any fashion the gifts you labor s...
When the missionaries got to the part bout Adam and Eve being naked, the Olinka peoples nearly bust out laughing. Especially when the missionaries tried to make them put on clothes because of this. Th...
Well, sometime Mr —— git on me pretty hard. I have to talk to Old Maker. But he my husband. I shrug my shoulders. This life soon be over, I say. Heaven last all ways.You ought to bash Mr —— head open,...
There is so much we don’t understand. And so much unhappiness comes because of that.
The longer I am a writer--so long now that my writing finger is periodically numb--the better I understand what writing is; what its function is; what it is supposed to do. I learn that the writer's p...
The Olinka girls do not believe girls should be educated. When I asked a mother why she thought this, she said: A girl is nothing to herself; only to her husband can she become something.What can she...
Standing beside the river, realizing that the water of earth is recycled forever, she deeply understood this: that there are two presents. One is of the moment. The other is of a longer moment - the m...
Shug: More than anything God love admiration.Celie: You saying God is vain?Shug: No, not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off when you walk by the colour purple in a fie...
She used to read to us without pity; forcing words, lies, other folks' habits, whole lives upon us two, sitting trapped and ignorant underneath her voice. She washed us in a river of make-believe, bur...
Oh, she say. God loves all them feelings. That's some of the best stuff God did. And when you know God loves 'em you enjoys 'em a lot more. You can just relax, go with everything that's going, and pra...
Let him hear me. If [god] ever listened to poor colored women, the world would be a different place.
I would have thought that a book that begins Dear God would immediately have been identified as a book about the desire to encounter, to hear from, the Ultimate Ancestor. Perhaps it is a sign of our t...
I wish I could be traveling with her, but thank God she able to do it. Sometimes I feel mad at her. Feel like I could scratch her hair right off her head. But then I think, Shug got a right to live to...
I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ast. And that in wondering bout the big things and asting bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know...
I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.' 'What it do when it pissed off?' I ast. 'Oh, it make something else. People think pleasing God is a...