Love Quote by Alice Walker

A quiet line like this can sound like self-help until you notice the bruise under it. "I try to teach my heart" splits the self in two: the speaker as both instructor and unruly student, reason staging an intervention with desire. Walker chooses "teach", not "tell" or "force", implying repetition, patience, and failure. The heart is not a switch; its cravings have to be trained, like a muscle with bad habits. That tenderness matters, because the sentence is also a concession: some wants will not be met, and pretending otherwise is its own cruelty.

The sharper subtext sits in "things it can't have". In a vacuum, it's personal restraint. In Walker's orbit - a Black woman writer shaped by the American South, civil rights struggle, and the long afterlife of deprivation - "can't" is rarely just romantic rejection. It's structural. It's the lived inventory of what is withheld by poverty, racism, sexism, and the cultural policing of who gets to want what without punishment. The line reads as both survival tactic and indictment: a person shouldn't have to domesticate their longing, but the world makes that strategy rational.

There's also an ethical tension. Training the heart can be wisdom, the kind that keeps you from breaking against locked doors. It can also be a warning about how oppression reproduces itself internally: you learn to desire less so the system doesn't have to change. Walker compresses that whole argument into one soft, unsentimental sentence.