Maya Angelou Quotes

There is a much-loved region in the American fantasy where pale white women float eternally under black magnolia trees, and white men with soft hands brush wisps of wisteria from the creamy shoulders of their lady loves. Harmonious black music drifts like perfume through this precious air, and nothing of a threatening nature intrudes.

The South I returned to, however, was flesh-real and swollen-belly poor.

While the rest of the world has been improving technology, Ghana has been improving the quality of mans humanity to a man.

Wouldn't take nothing for my journey now.

Poetry puts starch in your backbone so you can stand, so you can compose your life.

The world had taken a deep breath and was having doubts about continuing to revolve.

I've learned that whenever I decide something with an open heart, I usually make the right decision.

I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, "You know, that's the truth. I wasn't there, and wasn't a six-foot black girl, but that's the truth."

Even if they were society's pariahs, they were going to be angels in a marble white heaven and sit on the right hand of Jesus, the Son of God.

"Can I do it? I'd rather not try and fail."

"That's stupid talk, Maya. Every try will not succeed. But if you're going to live, live at all, your business is trying. And if you fail once, so what? Old folks say, Every shuteye ain't sleep and every goodbye ain't gone. You fail, you get up and try again."

Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.

"A story went the rounds about a San Franciscan white matron who refused to sit beside a Negro civilian on the streetcar, even after he made room for her on the seat. Her explanation was that she would not sit beside a draft dodger who was a Negro as well. She added that the least he could do was fight for his country the way her son was fighting on Iwo Jima. The story said that the man pulled his body away from the window to show an armless sleeve. He said quietly and with great dignity, "Then ask your son to look around for my arm, which I left over there.

One isn't necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We cannot be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.

I am a builder
Sometimes I have built well, but often
I have built without researching the ground
upon which I put my building
I raised a beautiful house
and I lived in it for a year
Then it slowly drifted away with the tides
for I had laid the foundation
upon shifting sand

I could never put my finger on her realness. She was so pretty and so quick that even when she had just awakened, her eyes full of sleep and hair tousled, I thought she looked just like the Virgin Mary. But what mother and daughter understand each other, or even have the sympathy for each other's lack of understanding? Mother

I want to thank you, Lord, for life and all that's in it.

Thank you for the day and for the hour, and the minute.