Maya Angelou

“Growing up, I decided, a long time ago, I wouldn't accept any manmade differences between human beings, differences made at somebody else's insistence or someone else's whim or convenience.”

“I would be stupid not to be on my own side. But I'm a human being, too. And I'm on the side of human beings, rather than on the side of crocodiles.”

“To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That's what Norman Mailer did. That's what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that's what I do - that's what I mean to do.”

“A cynical young person is almost the saddest sight to see, because it means that he or she has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.”

“I'm always disappointed when people don't live up to their potential. I know that a number of people look down on themselves and consequently on everybody who looks like them. But that, too, can change.”

“You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lines. You may trod me in the very dirt, but still, like dust, I'll rise.”

“I'm young as morningand fresh as dew.Everybody loves meand so do you.”

“All great artists draw from the same resource: the human heart, which tells us that we are all more alike than we are unalike.”

“Elimination of illiteracy is as serious an issue to our history as the abolition of slavery.”

“Thomas Wolfe warned in the title of America’s great novel that ‘You Can’t Go Home Again.’ I enjoyed the book but I never agreed with the title. I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and dragons of home under one’s skin, at the extreme corners of one’s eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe.Home is that youthful region where a child is the only real living inhabitant. Parents, siblings, and neighbors, are mysterious apparitions, who come, go, and do strange unfathomable things in and around the child, the region’s only enfranchised citizen.[…]We may act sophisticated and worldly but I believe we feel safest when we go inside ourselves and find home, a place where we belong and maybe the only place we really do.”

“Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.”

“The terrorist action of 9/11 gave birth to President Obama's entry to the White House. Not directly, but indirectly.”

“I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine... before she realizes she's reading.”

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

“Wouldn't take nothing for my journey now.”

“You have to develop ways so that you can take up for yourself, and then you take up for someone else. And so sooner or later, you have enough courage to really stand up for the human race and say, 'I'm a representative.'”

“In so many ways, segregation shaped me, and education liberated me.”

“I know that I've been guided by God. I am obedient.”

“Let's tell the truth to people. When people ask, 'How are you?' have the nerve sometimes to answer truthfully. You must know, however, that people will start avaoiding you because, they, too, have knees that pain them and heads that hurt and they don't want to know about yours. But think of it this way: If people avoid you, you will have more time to meditate and do fine research on a cure for whatever truly afflicts you.”

“I found it hard to think of leaving my books. They had been my elevators out of the midden, and to whom could I entrust such close friends?”