Get Your Grandmother

From the article entitled "We live in the best of all times" an interview with Alice Walker about her new book We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For

"If you try to do something, you're not actually accomplishing anything. But if you resove to do it, you accept that it is there for you to do and that you're perfectly capable of whatever it is. And of course there's no point in trying to do something you're incapable of. Then you use every conceivable atom, sinew, and instinct available to move whatever it is that you're trying to move."

On her grandmother

"As time went on, though I saw the damage to the feminine that patriarchy imposes, and I understood that it's often the old woman--the grandmother, with all that accumulated wisdom and compassion--who is depressed. She is depressed because she sees things so clearly, and she's lost her fear of speaking. We need her. We are not going to get anywhere without her, so we might as well go and start liberating all those nursing homes, and calling home, and getting our grandmothers back with us, and asking them to leave the sitcoms, and get them to come out from in front of the TV and give us some guidance, some of the understanding that they ave gained over all these decades."