Quotes from Maya Angelou

Success is liking yourself, liking what you do and liking how you do it.

Africans find it hard to forgive us slavery, don't they? He took my hand and said, I thought you would have known that. My dear, they can't forgive us, and even more terrible, they can't forgive themselves. They're like the young here in this tragic country [Germany]. They will never forgive their parents for what they did to the Jews, and they can't forgive the Jews for surviving and being a living testament to human bestiality.

Her husband remains, in my memory, undefined. I lumped him with all the other white men that I had ever seen and tried not to see.

Is it true the ribs can tell The kick of a beast from a Lover's fist?

Maya Angelou "I've learned that no matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow. I've learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way he/she handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights

Our Father, thank you for letting me see this New Day. Thank you that you didn't allow the bed I lay on last night to be my cooling board, nor my blanket my winding sheet. Guide my feet this day along the straight and narrow, and help me to put a bridle on my tongue. Bless this house, and everybody in it. Thank you, in the name of your Son, Jesus Christ, Amen." Before

I never had the nerve to go up to him. I was quite afraid that if I tried to say, Hello, Reverend Thomas, I would choke on the sin of mocking him.

Thus we lived through a major war. The questions in the ghettos was, can we make it through a minor peace?

You can only become great at that thing you're willing to sacrifice for.

During these years in Stamps, I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare. He was my first white love.

I made no attempt to wipe away the tears. I could not claim a forefather who came to America on the Mayflower. Nor did any ancestor of mine amass riches to leave me free from toil. My great-grandparents were illiterate when their fellow men were signing the Declaration of Independence, and the first families of my people were bought separately and sold apart, nameless and without traces – yet there was this: 'Deep River My home is over Jordan.

I am convinced that most people do not grow up. We find parking spaces and honor our credit cards. We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are still innocent and shy as magnolias.

It was awful to be Negro and have no control over my life. It was brutal to be young and already trained to sit quietly and listen to charges brought against my color with no chance of defense.

Style is as unique and nontransferable and perfectly personal as a fingerprint. It is wise to take the time to develop one's own way of being, increasing those things one does well and eliminating the elements in one's character which can hinder and diminish the good personality.

Independence is a heady draft, and if you drink it in your youth, it can have the same effect on the brain as young wine does.

after all, girls have to giggle, and after being a woman for theee years I was about to become a girl.

we had been each other's home and center for seventeen years. He could die if he wanted to and go off to wherever dead folks go, but I, I would be left without a home.

People whose history and future were threatened each day by extinction considered that it was only by divine intervention that they were able to live at all.

I made bitterness into a wad and swallowed it.

Love life, engage in it, give it all you've got. Love it with a passion because life truly does give back, many times over, what you put into it.

I began this lifelong lesson. If human beings eat a thing, and if I am not so violently repelled by my own upbringing that I cannot speak, and if it is visually clean within reason, and if I am not allergic to the offering, I will sit at the table and with all the gusto I can manufacture I will join in the feast. P.S. I call this a lifelong lesson for I have not fully learned it and I am often put to the test...

I was seventeen, very old, embarrassingly young

My mind struck a truth as an elbow can strike a table edge.

Try to be a rainbow in someones cloud There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.