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I write not only what I want to read...I write all the things I should have been able to read.
Alice Walker
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Interpretation

What this quote means

This quote emphasizes the importance of creating literature that addresses gaps in available knowledge or perspectives.

Alice Walker's quote illustrates the dual role of a writer: to express personal interests and desires in reading while also advocating for the inclusion of voices and stories that are often overlooked. It speaks to the responsibility of authors to contribute to the literary canon by addressing topics and narratives that they believe should be more readily accessible and recognized.

Themes

WritingLiteratureEducationPerspectivesStorytelling

In practice

Example use cases

In a writing workshop, this quote can inspire participants to write about untold stories.

More from Alice Walker

Animals can communicate quite well. And they do. And generally speaking, they are ignored
Alice WalkerRead
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.
Alice WalkerRead
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.
Alice WalkerRead
I think 'The Color Purple' is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the need for connection around the globe.
Alice WalkerRead
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?
Alice WalkerRead
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.
Alice WalkerRead

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We talk of globalization, and how much money is needed for the education of children in the world, their liberation and rehabilitation just $9 billion which is four days of military expense. Just four days. Nine billion dollars is nothing. But what Americans spent on ice cream just 20 percent of this. One fifth of what you spend on ice creams could bring the children out of the clutches of their masters and put them to school.
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You are at some point exposed to a wonderful story, and you really want to know what happens next, so you learn to read in order to find out.
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Extemporaneous speaking should be practised and cultivated. It is the lawyer's avenue to the public.
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When I first started studying Greek, one of my absolute favorite parts was realizing that so many English words had these old, secret roots. Learning Greek was like being given a super-power: linguistic x-ray vision.
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When I talk to students - and I still think of myself more than anything as a kind of professor on leave - they say, 'Well, how do I get to do what you do?'... And I say, 'Well, you have to start out by being a failed piano major.' And my point to them is don't try to have a 10-year plan. Find the next thing that interests you and follow that.
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