Maya Angelou Quotes

Whining is not only graceless, but can be dangerous. It can alert a brute that a victim is in the neighborhood.

I found it hard to think of leaving my books. They had been my elevators out of the midden, and to whom could I entrust such close friends?

I have need of a friend. There is one and only one who will give the air from his failing lungs for my body's mend. And that one is my love.

One morning as I was leaving, the director said I didn't have to leave the set anymore. What happened? Why did they change their ways of treating me? I came to the realization that it was because I had a mother. My mother spoke highly of me, and to me. But more important, whether they met her or simply heard about her, she was there with me. She had my back, supported me. This is the role of the mother, and in that visit I really saw clearly, and for the first time, why a mother is really important. Not just because she feeds and also loves and cuddles and even mollycoddles a child, but because in an interesting and maybe an eerie and unworldly way, she stands in the gap. She stands between the unknown and the known. In Stockholm, my mother shed her protective love down around me and without knowing why people sensed that I had value.

I am never proud to participate in violence, yet I know that each of us must care enough for ourselves that we can be ready and able to come to our own defense when and wherever needed.

I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.

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

The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.

The sadness of the women's movement is that they don't allow the necessity of love. See, I don't personally trust any revolution where love is not allowed.

Because I was really white and because a cruel fairy stepmother, who was understandably jealous of my beauty, had turned me into a too-big Negro girl, with nappy black hair, broad feet and a space between her teeth that would hold a number-two pencil.

The child gives, because the body can, and the mind of the violator cannot.

Miss Kirwin was that rare educator who was in love with information. I will always believe that her love of teaching came not so much from her liking for students but from her desire to make sure that some of the things she knew would find repositories so that they could be shared again.

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.

I had to trust life, since I was young enough to believe that life loved the person who dared to live it.

Don't do anything that you think is wrong. Just do what you think is right, and then be ready to back it up even with your life.