Maya Angelou

A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.

— Maya Angelou

I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life's a bitch. You've got to go out and kick ass.

— Maya Angelou

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.

— Maya Angelou

The need for change bulldozed road down the center of my mind.

— Maya Angelou

The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination, as are intelligence and necessity when unblunted by formal education.

— Maya Angelou

Of all the needs (there are none imaginary) a lonely child has, the one that must be satisfied, if there is going to be hope and a hope of wholeness, is the unshaken need for an unshakable God.

— Maya Angelou

Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.

— Maya Angelou

All of childhood's unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.

— Maya Angelou

I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water.

— Maya Angelou

We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.

— Maya Angelou

Education helps one case cease being intimidated by strange situations.

— Maya Angelou

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.

— Maya Angelou

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.

— Maya Angelou

My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.

— Maya Angelou

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.

— Maya Angelou

My life has been one great big joke, a dance that's walked a song that's spoke, I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself.

— Maya Angelou

Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: I'm with you kid. Let's go.

— Maya Angelou

Life loves the liver of it.

— Maya Angelou

There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.

— Maya Angelou

A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning's greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications. Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent.

— Maya Angelou

The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn't need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder -- in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.

— Maya Angelou

Nature has no mercy at all. Nature says, I'm going to snow. If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that's tough. I am going to snow anyway.

— Maya Angelou

At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.

— Maya Angelou

Each of us has the right and the responsibility to asses the road which lie ahead and those over which we have traveled, and if the feature road looms ominous or unpromising, and the road back uninviting-inviting, then we need to gather our resolve and carrying only the necessary baggage, step off that road into another direction. If the new choice is also unpalatable, without embarrassment, we must be ready to change that one as well.

— Maya Angelou

If you have only one smile in you, give it to the people you love. Don't be surly at home, then go out in the street and start grinning Good morning at total strangers.

— Maya Angelou

I believe that every person is born with talent.

— Maya Angelou

Since time is the one immaterial object which we cannot influence -- neither speed up nor slow down, add to nor diminish -- it is an imponderably valuable gift. Each of us has a few minutes a day or a few hours a week which we could donate to an old folks home or a children's hospital ward. The elderly whose pillows we plump or whose water pitchers we refill may or may not thank us for our gift, but the gift is upholding the foundation of the universe.

— Maya Angelou

Something made greater by ourselves and in turn that makes us greater.

— Maya Angelou

I answer the heroic question "Death where is thy sting?" "It is here in my heart and mind and memories"

— Maya Angelou

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.

— Maya Angelou

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

— Maya Angelou

There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.

— Maya Angelou

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the spaces between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.

— Maya Angelou

Alone, all alone. Nobody, but nobody can make it out here alone.

— Maya Angelou

“I probably couldn’t learn to cook creole food, anyway. It’s too complicated.” // “Sheeit. Ain’t nothing but onions, green peppers and garlic. Put that in everything and you got creole food.”

— Maya Angelou

You may trod me in the very dirt / But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

— Maya Angelou

History, despite its wrenching pain, / Cannot be unlived, and if faced / With courage, need not be lived again.

— Maya Angelou

There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

— Maya Angelou