Quotes from Maya Angelou

I thought of myself hanging in the store, as a mote imprisoned on a shaft of sunlight. Pushed and pulled by the slightest shift of air, but never falling free into the tempting darkness.

It may be enough, however, to have it said that we survive in exact relationship to the dedication of our poets (include preachers, musicians, and blues singers).

She said black women are so special. Few men of any color and even fewer white women can deal with how fabulous we are.

I thought about black women and wondered how we got to be the way we were. In our country, white men were always in superior positions; after them came white women, then black men, then black women, who were historically on the bottom stratum. How did it happen that we could nurse a nation of strangers, be maids to multitudes of people who scorned us, and still walk with some majesty and stand with a degree of pride?

I wanted to be a woman, but that seemed to me to be a world to which I was to be eternally refused entrance. What I needed was a boyfriend. A boyfriend would clarify my position to the world and, even more important, to myself. A boyfriend's acceptance of me would guide me into that strange and exotic land of frills and femininity.

A horse needs a tail more than one season.

She was our mother and belonged to us. She was never mentioned to anyone because we simply didn't have enough of her to share.

Preparation is rarely easy and never beautiful.

Try to be a rainbow in someone's cloud.

I should have known better than to lie to the government. People always said Uncle Sam would spend a thousand dollars to get you if you stole a three-cent stamp from him. He was more revengeful than God.

A person must make the effort to learn, and growing is the inevitable reward of learning.

Some decide that happiness and glee are the same thing, they are not. When we choose happiness we accept the responsibility to lighten the load of someone else and to be a light on the path of another who may be walking in darkness.

Maybe the cops have got him. The knowledge of what police do to black men rose wraithlike before my eyes.

Shadows on the wall Noises down the hall Life doesn't frighten me at all Bad dogs barking loud Big ghosts in a cloud Life doesn't frighten me at all.

In order to be profoundly dishonest, a person must have one of two qualities: either he is unscrupulously ambitious, or he is unswervingly egocentric.

Lovers think quite different thoughts while lying side by side.

Genet suggested that colonialism would crumble from the weight of its ignorance, its arrogance and greed, and that the oppressed would take over the positions of their former masters. They would be no better, no more courageous and no more merciful.

The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time that she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power.

I try to plant peace if I do not want discord; to plant loyalty and honesty if I want to avoid betrayal and lies.

Some writers dress the truth in a kind of elegant language, so it doesn't seem quite so blatant, so harsh, so raw. But Rosa was not afraid of that."

Carefully the leaves of autumn sprinkle down the tinny sound of little dyings and skies sated of ruddy sunsets of roseate dawns roil ceaselessly in cobweb grey and turn to black for comfort.

Three black men walked past us wearing airline uniforms, visored caps, white pants and jackets whose shoulders bristled with epaulettes. Black pilots? Black captains? It was 1962. In our country, the cradle of democracy, whose anthem boasted 'the land of the free, the home of the brave,' the only black men in our airports fueled planes, cleaned cabins, loaded food or were skycaps, racing the pavement for tips.

I've learned, I still have a lot to learn

Glasses clinked and voices rubbed each other.