Whenever you are creating beauty around you, you are restoring your own soul.

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.

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

You know how big love is? Love is big. love can hold anger; love can even hold hatred.

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.

Fear is real, but so is love.

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.

You have to give others the opportunity to love who you love. If they don't accept it, it's their loss.

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

Once you feel loved by the universe, you're already accepted, and you're not really concerned about offending people.

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

I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.

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.

Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.

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.

People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.

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.

Life is abundant, and life is beautiful. And it's a good place that we're all in, you know, on this earth, if we take care of 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.