Maya Angelou

If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.

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

If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. Don’t complain.

I’ve learned that no matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow.

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.

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.

Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.

It is better to be frightened now than killed hereafter

As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.

A man’s action is only a picture book of his creed.

Do what you know and perception is converted into character.

There is no life I know to compare with pure imagination. Living there, you’ll be free if you truly wish to be.

We are always getting ready to live but never living.

Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books nobody reads.

Tragedy was foresworn, in ritual denial of the ripe knowledge that we are drawing away from one another, that we share only one thing, share the fear of belonging to another, or to others, or to God; love or money, tender equated in advertising and the world, where only money is currency, and under dead trees and brittle ornaments prehensile hands exchange forgeries of what the heart dare not surrender.

Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.

Nakedness is uncomely, as well in mind as body, and it addeth no small reverence to men’s manners and actions if they be not altogether open. Therefore set it down: That a habit of secrecy is both politic and moral.

Somewhere inside all of us is the power to change the world.

What is it they want from a man that they didn’t get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he’s done his work? What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What’s left of the man when the work’s done but a shambles of apology.

He ate and drank the precious Words, his Spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, nor that his frame was Dust