Life & Wisdom Quote by Alice Walker

Neediness gets reframed here as ecology. Walker sketches humans as frantic performers: we sing, dance, mug for the crowd, hand over bouquets like tips for affection. The phrasing is intentionally plain and a little comic ("git attention"), which keeps the observation from sounding sermon-y. It lands as a sideways critique: our rituals of charm and courtship often feel less like joy than like bargaining for approval.

Then she swivels to trees and pulls off the slyest move in the line: nature as a mirror, not a moral scold. Trees also "perform" for attention, just on a slower, more honest timetable. They flower. They change color. They drop fruit. They make shade. They do spectacle and generosity without the human panic attached. The one thing they don't do is walk, which turns into the whole point: trees can't chase validation, so they have to attract it by being exactly what they are, rooted and visible.

Underneath is Walker's larger project as a writer: locating dignity and instruction in the natural world while diagnosing how social conditioning distorts our hunger for love. The quote carries her Southern voice and her long interest in how beauty, survival, and recognition intersect-especially for people taught to earn love through performance. It's not anti-human so much as anti-hustle. The joke is gentle, but the consequence is sharp: if even trees can "get attention" through flowering, maybe the problem isn't our desire to be loved-it's how quickly we turn that desire into a desperate act.