Maya Angelou Quotes

You must never be defeated no matter how many defeats you encounter.

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As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.

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Most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity of opportunity to be otherwise.

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I don't believe the accident of birth makes people sisters or brothers. It makes them siblings. Gives them mutuality of parentage. Sisterhood and brotherhood is a condition people have to work at.

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There is something more - the spirit, or the soul. I think that that quality encourages our courtesy and care and our minds. And mercy, and identity.

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

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I try to live what I consider a poetic existence. That means I take responsibility for the air I breathe and the space I take up. I try to be immediate, to be totally present for all my work.

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The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors, and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.

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One must know not just how to accept a gift, but with what grace to share it.

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I know why the caged bird sings.

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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.

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Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise.

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Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.

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Each of us has the right and the responsibility to assess the roads which lie ahead and . . . if the future road looms ominous or unpromising . . . then we need to gather our reslove and . . . step off . . . into another direction.

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

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God puts rainbows in the clouds so that each of us- in the dreariest and most dreaded moments- can see a possibility of hope.

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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.

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Some of us are timid. We think we have something to lose so we don't try for that next hill.

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I am overwhelmed by the grace and persistence of my people.

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We need to haunt the house of history and listen anew to the ancestors' wisdom.

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

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She cherished her race. She cherished women. She cared for gay and straight people. She prayed nightly for Palestine and equally for Israel.

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While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God's creation.

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All great achievements require time.

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

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