Alice Walker

A single-volume compilation of two works pairs the writer's Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning master work with the author-described "romance of the last 500,000 years."

The Temple of My Familiar

The Color Purple

Eli Alvah Huckabee

Helen 

I feel bad sometime Nettie done pass me in learnin. But look like nothing she say can git in my brain and try to tell me something bout the ground not being flat. I just say, Yeah, like I know it. I never tell her how flat it look to me. stay. 

But she keep on. You got to fight. You got to fight. 

But I don't know how to fight. All I know how to do is stay alive.

But I had also parsed ths there was something powerful about blondness, thinness flatness, and gaps between thighs. And that power was the context against which all others defined themselves. That was beauty. And while few young women in high school could say they felt like they lived up to beauty, only the non- white girls could never be beautiful. That is because beauty isn't actually what you look like; beauty is the preferences that reproduce the existing social order. 

Did I mention my first sight of the African coast? Something struck in me, in my soul, Celie, like a large bell, and I just vibrated. Corrine and Samuel felt the same. And we kneeled down right on deck and gave thanks to God for letting us see the land for which our mothers and fathers cried and lived and died– to see again. 

Oh, Celie! Will I ever be able to tell you all? I dare not ask, I know. But leave it all to God. 

The children saw the change in us immediately. I'm afraid my dear, we were radiant. 

You may have guessed that I loved him all along; but I did not know it. Oh, I loved him as a brother and respected him as a friend, but Celie, I love him bodily, as a man! I love his walk, his size, his shape, his smell, the kinkiness of his hair. I love the very texture of his palms. The pink of his inner lip. I love his big nose. I love his brows. I love his feet. And I love his dear eyes in which the vulnerability and beauty of his soul can be plainly read.

Just because I came back with you, don't think I am saying yes to marriage, says Tashi. 

Oh yes you are, says Adamn, heatedly, but through a yawn. You promised your mother. I promised your mother.

Nobody in America will like me, says Tashi.  

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 nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, he say, the more I love.

eileen lee

When it come to what folks do together with they bodies, he say, anybody's guess is as good as mine. But when you talk bout love I don't have to guess. I have love and I have been love.

The Color Purple quotes

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