Maya Angelou

We, unaccustomed to courage exiles from delight live coiled in shells of loneliness until love leaves its high holy temple and comes into our sight to liberate us into life. Love arrives and in its train come ecstasies old memories of pleasure ancient histories of pain. Yet if we are bold, love strikes away the chains of fear from our souls. We are weaned from our timidity 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.

Nature has no mercy at all. Nature says, I’m going to snow. If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that’s tough. I am going to snow anyway.

For Africa to me… is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

Courage: the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.

I answer the heroic question Death where is thy sting? It is here in my heart and mind and memories

Out of the huts of history’s shame I rise Up from a past that’s rooted in pain I rise I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide, Welling and swelling I bear in the tide. Leaving behind nights of terror and fear I rise Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear I rise Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise.

Benny Goodman was one of the big influences as a clarinet player. That’s why I wanted the clarinet.

Three months. I was playing the organ for three months. It was a challenge for me in the beginning.

Music opens up minds to dream great dreams about where you can go and what you can do.

Being a Jazz musician is not a rose garden!

If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.

I do the best I can with any instrument I get attracted to. But they’re just tools in order for you to express yourself and that’s really the upshot of it.

Surrender your whole being to a note and gravity disappears.

Most jazz players work out their solos, at least to the extent that they have a very specific vocabulary.

Mozart in his music was probably the most reasonable of the world’s great composers. It is the happy balance between flight and control, between sensibility and self-discipline, simplicity and sophistication of style that is his particular province… Mozart tapped once again the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breath-taking rightness that has never since been duplicated.

Albert King wasn’t my brother in blood, but he sure was my brother in Blues!

And then when I found my sound, it took me two and a half weeks to find my sound and when I did I pulled out all the stops, all the stops I could find.

It isn’t where you came from, its where you’re going that counts.

I never have any trouble playing anything I can think of. The trouble is thinking of what to play.

My audience was my life. What I did and how I did it was all for my audience.

A great teacher stimulates his student’s creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves.