Quotes from Maya Angelou

If you're always trying to be normal, you'll never know how amazing you can be.

One isn't necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.

Se crescere è doloroso per una bambina nra del Sud, rendersi conto di essere fuori posto è la ruggine sul rasoio puntato alla gola. E' un insulto superfluo.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude.

And still I rise

Every person I knew had a hellish horror of being called out of his name. It was a dangerous practice to call a Negro anything that could be loosely construed as insulting because of the centuries of their having been called niggers, jigs, dinges, blackbirds, crows, boots and spooks.

Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time

Life seems to love the liver of it.

Tears The crystal rags Viscous tatters of a worn-through soul. Moans Deep swan song Blue farewell of a dying dream.

In diversity there is beauty and there is strength.

It is through the eyes of strangers that a parent can see their children as people.

Baby, the fifties are everything you've been meaning to be.

Whites were safely isolated from our concerns. When they chose, they could lift the racial curtain that separated us. They could indulge in sexual escapades, increase our families with mulatto bastards, make fortunes out of our music and eunuchs out of our men, then in seconds they could step away, and return unscarred to their pristine security.

Aprendi que as pessoas se esquecerão daquilo que você disse, esquecerão daquilo que fez, mas nunca se esquecerão da maneira como as fez sentir.

The tragedy of lameness seems so unfair to children that they are embarrassed in its presence. And they, most recently off nature's mold, sense that they have only narrowly missed being another of her jokes. In relief at the narrow escape, they vent their emotions in impatience and criticism of the unlucky cripple.

If you have only one smile in you give it to the people you love. If you don't like something, change it.

After a short labor, and without too much pain (I decided that the pain of delivery was overrated), my son was born.

In the evening, when we were alone like that, Uncle Willie didn't stutter or shake or give any indication that he had an affliction. It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect.

Momma could not take the smallest achievement for granted. 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 find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed.

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

Midwives and winding sheets know birthing is hard and dying is mean and living's a trial in between. Why do we journey, muttering like rumors among the stars? Is a dimension lost? Is it love?

I'll accept no excuse if you return a book to me that has been badly handled. My imagination boggled at the punishment I would deserve if in fact I did abuse a book of Mrs Flowers'. Death would be too kind and brief.

Champion of the world. A Black boy. Some Black mother's son. He was the strongest man in the world.

I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel