Maya Angelou

“I don’t know about lying for novelists. I look at some of the great novelists, and I think the reason they are great is that they’re telling the truth. The fact is they’re using made-up names, made-up people, made-up places, and made-up times, but they’re telling the truth about the human being—what we are capable of, what makes us lose, laugh, weep, fall down, and gnash our teeth and wring our hands and kill each other and love each other.”

“If we lose love and self respect for each other,this is how we finally die”

“I answer the heroic question, 'Death, where is thy sting?' with 'It is in my heart and mind and memories.”

“Water isn't shaped like a river or ocean; it mists invisibly against metal and glass”

“Soft you day, be velvet soft, My true love approaches, Look you bright, you dusty sun, Array your golden coaches.Soft you wind, be soft as silk My true love is speaking. Hold you birds, your silver throats, His golden voice I'm seeking.Come you death, in haste, do come My shroud of black be weaving, Quiet my heart, be deathly quiet, My true love is leaving.”

“You saw me bludgeoned by circumstance.Lost, injured, hurt by chance.I screamed to the heavens....loudly screamed....Trying to change our nightmares into dreams...”

“Graduation, the hush-hush magic time of frills and gifts and congratulations and diplomas, was finished for me before my name was called. The accomplishment was nothing. The meticulous maps, drawn in three colors of ink, learning and spelling decasyllabic words, memorizing the whole of The Rape of Lucrece - it was for nothing. Donleavy had exposed us.We were maids and farmers, handymen and washerwomen, and anything higher that we aspired to was farcical and presumptuous.”

“Life's a bitch. You've got to go out and kick ass”

“We may act sophisticated and worldly but I believe we feel safest when we go inside ourselves and find home, a place where we belong and maybe the only place we really do.”

“The“b” word and the “n” word are like poison, whether you take poison from a vial or pour it into Bavarian crystal, it is still poison.”

“We are only as blind as we want to be.”

“Amazing Peace: A Christmas PoemThunder rumbles in the mountain passesAnd lightning rattles the eaves of our houses.Flood waters await us in our avenues.Snow falls upon snow, falls upon snow to avalancheOver unprotected villages.The sky slips low and grey and threatening.We question ourselves.What have we done to so affront nature?We worry God.Are you there? Are you there really?Does the covenant you made with us still hold?Into this climate of fear and apprehension, Christmas enters,Streaming lights of joy, ringing bells of hopeAnd singing carols of forgiveness high up in the bright air.The world is encouraged to come away from rancor,Come the way of friendship.It is the Glad Season.Thunder ebbs to silence and lightning sleeps quietly in the corner.Flood waters recede into memory.Snow becomes a yielding cushion to aid usAs we make our way to higher ground.Hope is born again in the faces of childrenIt rides on the shoulders of our aged as they walk into their sunsets.Hope spreads around the earth. Brightening all things,Even hate which crouches breeding in dark corridors.In our joy, we think we hear a whisper.At first it is too soft. Then only half heard.We listen carefully as it gathers strength.We hear a sweetness.The word is Peace.It is loud now. It is louder.Louder than the explosion of bombs.We tremble at the sound. We are thrilled by its presence.It is what we have hungered for.Not just the absence of war. But, true Peace.A harmony of spirit, a comfort of courtesies.Security for our beloveds and their beloveds.We clap hands and welcome the Peace of Christmas.We beckon this good season to wait a while with us.We, Baptist and Buddhist, Methodist and Muslim, say come.Peace.Come and fill us and our world with your majesty.We, the Jew and the Jainist, the Catholic and the Confucian,Implore you, to stay a while with us.So we may learn by your shimmering lightHow to look beyond complexion and see community.It is Christmas time, a halting of hate time.On this platform of peace, we can create a languageTo translate ourselves to ourselves and to each other.At this Holy Instant, we celebrate the Birth of Jesus ChristInto the great religions of the world.We jubilate the precious advent of trust.We shout with glorious tongues at the coming of hope.All the earth's tribes loosen their voicesTo celebrate the promise of Peace.We, Angels and Mortal's, Believers and Non-Believers,Look heavenward and speak the word aloud.Peace. We look at our world and speak the word aloud.Peace. We look at each other, then into ourselvesAnd we say without shyness or apology or hesitation.Peace, My Brother.Peace, My Sister.Peace, My Soul.”

“At the end of the day people won't remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel.”

“I don't believe an accident of birth makes people sisters or brothers. It makes them siblings, gives them mutuality of parentage. Sisterhood and brotherhood is a condition people have to work at.”

“Poetry is music for the human voice. Until you actually speak it or someone speaks it, it has not come into its own.”

“If more Africans had eaten missionaries, the continent would be in better shape.”

“The trouble for the thief is not how to steal the chief's bugle, but where to blow it,”

“My mother raised me, and then freed me,”

“Be wary when a naked person offers you his shirt.”

“I’m grateful for being here, for being able to think, for being able to see, for being able to taste, for appreciating love – for knowing that it exists in a world so rife with vulgarity, with brutality and violence, and yet love exists. I’m grateful to know that it exists.”

“He was a simple man who had no inferiority complex about his lack of education, and even more amazing no superiority complex because he had succeeded despite that lack.”

“We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans — because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone- because we have the impulse to explain who we are. Not just how tall we are, or thin… but who we are internally… perhaps even spiritually. There’s something, which impels us to show our inner-souls. The more courageous we are, the more we succeed in explaining what we know.”

“Let nothing dim the light that shines from within”

“I would like to be known as an intelligent woman, a courageous woman, a loving woman, a woman who teaches by being.”

“Hanging softly over the black Singer sewing machine, it looked like magic, and when people saw me wearing it they were going to run up to me and say, "Marguerite, forgive us, please, we didn't know who you were," and I would answer generously, "No, you couldn't have known. Of course I forgive you.”

“Words are things. You must be careful, careful about calling people out of their names, using racial pejoratives and sexual pejoratives and all that ignorance. Don’t do that. Some day we’ll be able to measure the power of words. I think they are things. They get on the walls. They get in your wallpaper. They get in your rugs, in your upholstery, and your clothes, and finally in to you.”

“Each time a woman stands up for herself, without knowing it possibly, without claiming it, she stands up for all women.”

“If you are always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you can be.”

“Thomas Wolfe warned in the title of America’s great novel that ‘You Can’t Go Home Again.’ I enjoyed the book but I never agreed with the title. I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and dragons of home under one’s skin, at the extreme corners of one’s eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe.Home is that youthful region where a child is the only real living inhabitant. Parents, siblings, and neighbors, are mysterious apparitions, who come, go, and do strange unfathomable things in and around the child, the region’s only enfranchised citizen.[…]We may act sophisticated and worldly but I believe we feel safest when we go inside ourselves and find home, a place where we belong and maybe the only place we really do.”

“Faith is the evidence of the unseen.”

“Cotton rows crisscross the worldAnd dead-tired nights of yearningThunderbolts on leather stropsAnd all my body burningSugar cane reach up to GodAnd every baby cryingShame a blanket of my nightAnd all my days are dying”

“Yet it is only love which sets us free.”

“Hope for the best, be prepared for the worse. Life is shocking, but you must never appear to be shocked. For no matter how bad it is it could be worse and no matter how good it is it could be better.”

“On this platform of peace, we can create a languageto translate ourselves to ourselves and to each other.”

“You can only become great at something you are willing to sacrifice for”

“You should never make someone a priority who views you as an option.”

“If you're for the right thing, you do it without thinking.”

“Every person needs to take one day away.  A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future.  Jobs, family, employers, and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence.  Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for.  Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us.”

“love. she liberated me to life, she continued to do that. and when she was in her final sickness i went out to san francisco and the doctor said she had 3 weeks to live, i asked her "would you come to north carolina?" she said yes. she had emphysema and lung cancer, i brought her to my home. she lived for a year and a half ..and when she was finally in extemis, she was on oxygen and fighting cancer for her life and i remembered her liberating me, and i said i hoped i would be able to liberate her, she deserved that from me. she deserved a great daughter and she got one. so in her last days, i said "i understand some people need permission to go… as i understand it you may have done what god put you here to do. you were a great worker, you must've been a great lover cause a lot of men and if I'm not wrong maybe a couple of woman risked their lives to love you. you were a piss poor mother of small children but a you were great mother of young adults, and if you need permission to go, i liberate you". and i went back to my house, and something said go back- i was in my pajamas, i jumped in my car and ran and the nurse said "she just gone". you see love liberates. it doesn't bind, love says i love you. i love you if you're in china, i love you if you're across town, i love you if you're in harlem, i love you. i would like to be near you, i would like to have your arms around me i would like to have your voice in my ear but thats not possible now, i love you so go. love liberates it doesn't hold. thats ego. love liberates.”

“There is a true yearning to respond to the singing river and wise rock.”

“The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time that she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power.The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.”

“Until recently each generation found it more expedient to plead guilty to the charge of being young and ignorant, easier to take the punishment meted out by the older generation (which had itself confessed to the same crime short years before). The command to grow up at once was more bearable than the faceless horror of wavering purpose, which was youth.”

“The needs of a society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who is offered only the crumbs from his country's table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast. Hence the janitor who lives in one room but sports a robin's-egg-blue Cadillac is not laughed at but admired, and the domestic who buys forty-dollar shoes is not criticized but is appreciated. We know that they have put to use their full mental and physical powers. Each single gain feeds into the gains of the body collective.”

“Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.”

“It was awful to be Negro and have no control over my life. It was brutal to be young and already trained to sit quietly and listen to charges brought against my color with no chance of defense. We should all be dead. I thought I should like to see us all dead, one on top of the other. A pyramid of flesh with the whitefolks on the bottom, as the broad base, then the Indians with their silly tomahawks and teepees and wigwams and treaties, the Negroes with their mops and recipes and cotton sacks and spirituals sticking out of their mouths. The Dutch children should all stumble in their wooden shoes and break their necks. The French should choke to death on the Louisiana Purchase (1803) while silkworms ate all the Chinese with their stupid pigtails. As a species, we were an abomination. All of us.”

“People whose history and future were threatened each day by extinction considered that it was only by divine intervention that they were able to live at all. I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed.”

“As soon as healing takes place, go out and heal somebody else.”

“What sets one Southern town apart from another, or from a Northern town or hamlet, or city high-rise? The answer must be the experience shared between the unknowing majority (it) and the knowing minority (you). All of childhood's unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.”

“The best candy shop a child can be left alone in, is the library”

“Because of the routines we follow, we often forget that life is an ongoing adventure. . . Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art: to bring all our energies to each encounter, to remain flexible enough to notice and admit when what we expected to happen did not happen. We need to remember that we are created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed.”