Maya Angelou Quotes

When I find myself filling with rage over the loss of a beloved, I try as soon as possible to remember that my concerns and questions should be focused on what I learned or what I have yet to learn from my departed love. What legacy was left which can help me in the art of living a good life?

In the flush of love's light
we dare be brave
And suddenly we see
that love costs all we are
and will ever be.
Yet it is only love
which sets us free.

Just like moons and suns,
With certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

Achievement brings it own anticlimax.

The devil lives in our mistakes, the lord lives in our rights. Who lives in our ignorance, and who wins after all?

There are some nights when
sleep plays coy,
aloof and disdainful.
And all the wiles
that I employ to win
its service to my side
are useless as wounded pride,
and much more painful.

The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.

Although there was always generosity in the Negro neighborhood, it was indulged on pain of sacrifice. Whatever was given by Black people to other Blacks was most probably needed as desperately by the donor as by the receiver. A fact which made the giving or receiving a rich exchange.

Your reputation is the most important thing you’ll never have. Not clothes, nor money, not the big cars you may drive. If your reputation is good, you can achieve anything you want in the world.

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.

I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.

Glory falls around us as we sob a dirge of desolation on the Cross

"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.

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.

If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat.