Quotes from Maya Angelou

we were right-handed into a dully furnished living room. L.D.

He looked at me squarely, forcing me to face my fears. Now My, if you're happy being miserable, enjoy it, but don't ask me to feel sorry for you. Just get all down in it and wallow around. Take your time to savor all its subtleties, but don't come to me expecting sympathy.

I thought of human beings, as far back as I had read, of our deeds and didoes. According to some scientists, we were born to forever crawl in swamps, but for some not yet explained reason, we decided to stand erect and, despite gravity's pull and push, to remain standing. We, carnivorous beings, decided not to eat our brothers and sisters but to try to respect them. And further, to try to love them.

Then they would face another day of trying to earn enough for the whole year with the heavy knowledge that they were going to end the season as they started it. Without the money or credit necessary to sustain a family for three months.

You're my daughter. Don't take tea for the fever. You are your own woman.

I'd call a place pure paradise where families are loyal and strangers are nice, where the music is jazz and the season is fall. Promise me that or nothing at all.

Her world was bordered on all sides with work, duty, religion and her place. I don't think she ever knew that a deep-brooding love hung over everything she touched.

History, despite its wrenching pain, Cannot be unlived, but if faced With courage, need not be lived again.

Oh, Black known and unknown poets, how often have your auctioned pains sustained us?

I come as one but I stand as ten thousand.

My mother wrote to me and said, "Airplanes leave here every day for Africa. If you need me, I will come." Her love and support encouraged me to dare to live my life with pizzazz.

It is important that we learn humility, which says there was someone else before me who paid for me. My responsibility is to prepare myself so that I can pay for someone else who is yet to come."- Maya Angelou

My mother complimented me on my decision and said I would do wonders.

Her apprehension was evident in the hurried movements around the kitchen and in her lonely fearing eyes. The Black woman in the South who raises sons, grandsons and nephews had her heartstrings tied to a hanging noose. Any break from routine may herald for them unbearable news. For this reason, Southern Blacks until the present generation could be counted among America's arch conservatives.

Bailey told me after that Joyce had hairs on her thing and that she had gotten them from doing it with so many boys. She even had hair under her arms. Both of them. He was very proud of her accomplishments.

our people are in need of truth and I have tried and will continue to try to speak only truth to the people.

Momma, always self-conscious at public displays of emotions not traceable to a religious source, told me to come with her and we'd bring the bread and bowls.

There is no greater agony that bearing an untold story inside you.

We are more alike than we are unalike

Malcolm X was as good as his word. He said, "Black people are letting white Americans know that the time is coming for ballots or bullets. They know it is useless to ask their enemy for justice. And surely whites are the enemies of blacks, otherwise how did we get to this country in the first place?

The mouth, opened to show the long teeth, was a dark room furnished with a few white chairs.

The "boys"? Those cement faces and eyes of hate that burned the clothes off you if they happened to see you lounging on the main street downtown on Saturday. Boys? It seemed that youth had never happened to them. Boys? No, rather men who were covered with graves' dust and age without beauty or learning. The ugliness and rottenness of old abominations.

I would miss Mrs. Flowers, for she had given me her secret word which...was to serve me all my life: books.

Oh, Black known and unknown poets, how often have your auctioned pains sustained us? Who will compute the lonely nights made less lonely by your songs, or by the empty pots made less tragic by your tales?