Animals can communicate quite well. And they do. And generally speaking, they are ignored
I think there is a sense of being forced at this time to look at America's really large shadow and that's not all that bad.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote suggests that confronting uncomfortable truths about America is necessary and can lead to positive outcomes.
Alice Walker's quote highlights the importance of facing the darker aspects of a nation's history and identity, suggesting that acknowledging these truths can be a catalyst for growth and understanding. By referring to America's 'large shadow,' she implies that there are significant challenges and issues that need to be addressed, but ultimately views this confrontation as a constructive process rather than a purely negative one.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about social justice, one could reference this quote to emphasize the need to address systemic issues.
More from Alice Walker
All quotes →June Jordan, who died of cancer in 2002, was a brilliant, fierce, radical, and frequently furious poet. We were friends for thirty years. Not once in that time did she step back from what was transpiring politically and morally in the world. She spoke up, and led her students, whom she adored, to do the same.
On a spiritual level, it's as though with my sighted eye I see what's before me, and with my unsighted eye I see what's hidden. It's illuminated life more than darkened it.
I think 'The Color Purple' is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the need for connection around the globe.
How long will it take the citizens of the United States, one wonders, to recognize that the house their country bombed in Iraq is the same one they were living in until it was foreclosed?
One white man on the platform in South Carolina asked us where we were going--we had got off the train to get some fresh air and to dust the grit and dust out of our clothes. When we said Africa he looked offended and tickled too. Niggers going to Africa, he said to his wife. Now I have seen everything.
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It is incredible how as soon as a people become subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and willingly that one is led to say that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement.
The earth is real. Only a fool, milking his cow, denies the cow's reality.
Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray.
Let’s take this figure of the feminist killjoy seriously. Does the feminist kill other people’s joy by pointing out moments of sexism? Or does she expose the bad feelings that get hidden, displaced, or negated under public signs of joy? Does bad feeling enter the room when somebody expresses anger about things, or could anger be the moment when the bad feelings that circulate through objects get brought to the surface in a certain way?
I think it would collapse my heart if I was super famous. I don't have the nerve for it, I'm too anxious. I don't know how you're not obsessed with how people perceive you, because they're real people, you know? You can convince yourself that they don't really know you, and that's true, but how can it not hurt your feelings?