“Everything want to be loved”

“Everything want to be loved” expresses Shug Avery’s account of divinity as a presence shared by people and the natural world. The phrase turns love from a human need into a broad principle of relation: people sing and dance for affection, while trees, flowers, and other forms of life likewise seem to seek notice. For Celie, this idea offers a way to approach God outside the narrow image of a distant white male authority.

Context: A Different God

The expression comes amid Celie’s struggle with religious belief. She has stopped writing to God and writes instead to Nettie, prompting Shug to ask what happened to God. Celie’s estrangement is bound up with the image of God as white and male, and with the conviction that white people do not listen to Black people. Shug answers not by defending that image but by describing God as present within every person, something people may find by searching inwardly or encounter through trouble and sorrow. She insists that this presence is neither male nor female.

That reimagining stands against the church’s treatment of Shug. When Shug is sick, the preacher turns her condition into a sermon condemning her as a sexually improper woman, and the congregation answers with approval. The scene makes religious language a source of public judgment; Shug’s later account offers a contrasting spiritual language grounded in shared life, attention, and love rather than condemnation.

Love in the Natural World

Shug explains that God loves what people love, as well as much that they overlook, and especially values admiration—not from vanity, but from a desire to share what is good. Her example is a field’s purple color: walking past it without noticing is a failure of attention to the world’s beauty. In this account, creation is not merely evidence of a remote God. Its beauty is part of an ongoing exchange in which the world offers something and people can answer by seeing it.

The statement that everything wants love extends this thought through a playful comparison. People sing, dance, make faces, and give bouquets in hopes of being loved; trees, Shug observes, do everything people do to attract attention except walk. The comparison gives nonhuman life a lively presence without making it identical to human life. Celie’s own response shows how the idea works: she recognizes that her preoccupation with the “old white man” in her mind has kept her from noticing a blade of corn, the color purple, or wildflowers.

Meaning for Celie

The expression does not instantly resolve Celie’s uncertainty: she says she is still adrift even as she tries to displace the old image of God. Its significance lies instead in changing what she might attend to. Spiritual connection becomes less a matter of appealing to a figure who does not seem to listen and more a practice of searching within, recognizing others, and noticing what the world makes. Shug’s formulation links that inward search to attention beyond the self: the divine is present in people, while the color purple and small wildflowers offer concrete occasions to recognize creation’s appeal for notice.