Rebecca Walker > Quotes

“. . . when it comes down to it, that’s what life is all about: showing up for the people you love, again and again, until you can’t show up anymore.”
― Rebecca Walker, Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence

“Sex can look like love if you don't know what love looks like.”
― Rebecca Walker

“It seems to me, that this, too, is how memory works. What we remember of what was done to us shapes our view, molds us, sets our stance. But what we remember is past, it no longer exists, and yet we hold on to it, live by it, surrender so much control to it. What do we become when we put down the scripts written by history and memory, when each person before us can be seen free of the cultural or personal narrative we've inherited or devised?
When we, ourselves, can taste that freedom.”
― Rebecca Walker

“Because mothers make us, because they map our emotional terrain before we even know we are capable of having an emotional terrain, they know just where to stick the dynamite. With a few small power plays - a skeptical comment, the withholding of approval or praise - a mother can devastate a daughter. Decades of subtle undermining can stunt a daughter, or so monopolize her energy that she in effect stunts herself. Muted, fearful, riddled with self-doubt, she can remain trapped in daughterhood forever, the one place she feels confident she knows the rules.”
― Rebecca Walker, Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence

“One may be nice on the outside but on the inside isnt pretty”
― Rebecca Walker, To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism

“For many of us it seems that to be a feminist in the way that we have seen or understood feminism is to conform to an identity and way of living that doesn't allow for individuality, complexity, or less than perfect personal histories. We fear that the identity will dictate and regulate our lives, instantaneously pitting us against someone, forcing us to choose inflexible and unchanging sides, female against male, black against white, oppressed against oppressor, good against bad.”
― Rebecca Walker, To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism

“What the heart desires is medicine to itself. Does that make sense?”
― Rebecca Walker, Ade: A Love Story

“Blood strikes back.”
― Rebecca Walker, Black White and Jewish

“I don't trust the everyday: it is a mask, a sham. It gives the illusion of permanence, of an unshatterable calm, a placid surface; and yet underneath the pot is slowly coming to a boil.”
― Rebecca Walker, Black White and Jewish

“You are my first love.” And then, “You will be my only love.”
― Rebecca Walker, Ade: A Love Story

“Take this one in my belly. He (or she) is determined to be here. I can feel the force of his being. It's as if he has something to do here and just wants to arrive and grow up so he can get to it.”
― Rebecca Walker, Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence

“...when it comes down to it, that's what life is all about: showing up for the people you love, again and again, until you can't show up anymore.”
― Rebecca Walker

“What the heart desires is medicine to itself.”
― Rebecca Walker, Ade: A Love Story

“This often has a lot to do with racism and sexism, and the stories we are "allowed" to tell as people of colour.”
― Rebecca Walker, Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves

“When people ask what I would tell my younger self, the budding writer at the beginning of her career, it is always the same: I wish I could have prepared myself for what happens to a writer when she is brutally honest, when she speaks truth to power in a raw and emotional way. The literary establishment continues to privilege work that’s just a touch removed, “refined” they would call it. Writers who tone down their anguish, their rage, their nontraditional, “deviant choices are perceived as more skilled, more worthy of critical acclaim. This often has a lot to do with racism and sexism, and the stories we are “allowed” to tell as people of color. The classification is not a new phenomenon nor is the marginalization of powerful autobiographical stories that demand engagement. I wish I had known all this, not because I would have done things differently, but because I would not have been so surprised by some of the dismissive responses to my work. I would have been more prepared.”
― Rebecca Walker, Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves

“Romantic love doth not a family make. Bogus, manufactured ideas of following your bliss can lead you over a cliff without a parachute.”
― Rebecca Walker, One Big Happy Family: 18 Writers Talk About Open Adoption, Mixed Marriage, Polyamory, Househusbandry, Single Motherhood, and Other Realities of Truly Modern Love

“No matter the response though, I still and will always believe that representation of all kinds is essential. My work-the memoirs, anthologies, novels, television pilots, magazine articles-is just one long attempt to make sure that people from different backgrounds are seen and heard, especially people who are in some practical way challenging the status quo, and offering different interpretations of what it means to be a human being right now. What it means to be a feminist, for example, what it means to be a man in a culture that demands toxic masculinity. What it means to spend your days challenging the racism coded into artificial intelligence, to be pansexual and polyamorous, to be the third generation in your family to struggle with schizophrenia, to embark on the arduous search for your identity as a transracial adoptee. To have a family member in prison.”
― Rebecca Walker, Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves

“I had too much power, I thought. I might consume him out of my own curiosity simply because I could. I could stay or go. He could not. He had too much power, I thought. He could reject me. He could break me in two.”
― Rebecca Walker, Ade: A Love Story

“With just one look, Black women keep a cool distance between ourselves and reality rushing toward us on a daily basis and achieve the superhuman ability to live above our world—making living in it possible.”
― Rebecca Walker, Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness