Quotes from Maya Angelou

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

After that exercise, the ship of my life might or might not be sailing on calm seas. The challenging days of my existence might or might not be bright and promising. From that encounter on, whether my days are stormy or sunny and if my nights are glorious or lonely, I maintain an attitude of gratitude. If pessimism insists on occupying my thoughts, I remember there is always tomorrow. Today I am blessed.

Without willing it, I had gone from being ignorant of being ignorant to being aware of being aware. And the worst part of my awareness was that I didn't know what I was aware of.

A Conceit Give me your hand Make room for me to lead and follow you beyond this rage of poetry. Let others have the privacy of touching words and love of loss of love. For me Give me your hand.

Be certain that you do not die without having done something wonderful for humanity.

Very few people grow up

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.

Be the best of anything you get into. If you want to be a whore, it's your life. Be a damn good one. Don't chippy at anything. Anything worth having is worth working for.' It was her version of Polonius' speech to Laertes. With that wisdom in my pouch, I was to go out and buy my future.

He was away in a mystery, locked in the enigma that young Southern Black boys start to unravel, start to try to unravel, from seven years old to death. The humorless puzzle of inequality and hate.

I find it very difficult to let a friend or beloved go into that country of no return. I answer the heroic question, Death, where is thy sting? with It is here in my heart, and my mind, and my memories.

not only was cleanliness next to Godliness, dirtiness was the inventor of misery.

Every person under the sound of my voice is a soldier. You are either fighting for your freedom or betraying the fight for freedom or enlisted in the army to deny somebody else freedom.

Hadn't I, always, but ever and ever, thought that life was just one great risk for the living?

Although I had no regrets, I told myself sadly that growing up was not the painless process one would have thought it to be.

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.

Childhood's logic never asks to be proved (all conclusions are absolute).

What is a fear of living? It's being preeminently afraid of dying. It is not doing what you came here to do, out of timidity and spinelessness. The antidote is to take full responsibility for yourself - for the time you take up and the space you occupy. If you don't know what you're here to do, then just do some good.

The plague of racism is insidious, entering into our minds as smoothly and quietly and invisibly as floating airborne microbes enter into our bodies to find lifelong purchase in our bloodstreams.

People may not remember what you said, but they will remember how you made them feel

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.

It seemed terribly unfair to have a toothache and a headache and have to bear at the same time the heavy burden of Blackness.

Being free is as difficult and as perpetual — or rather fighting for one's freedom, struggling towards being free, is like struggling to be a poet or a good Christian or a good jew or a good Moslem or a good Zen Buddhist. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up in the next morning with the job still to be done. So you start all over again.

I have learned to accept my responsibility and to forgive myself first, then to apologise to anyone injured by my misreckoning.

You have tried to destroy me and though I perish daily, I shall not be moved.