Maya Angelou

If the pretties were expected to make the supreme sacrifice in order to ‘belong,’ what could the unattractive female do?

Maya Angelou

Just because I am wheelchair-bound doesn’t mean I don’t get around.

Maya Angelou

My mom was a terrible parent of young children. And thank God – I thank God every time I think of it – I was sent to my paternal grandmother. Ah, but my mother was a great parent of a young adult.

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

Never let white folks know what you really think. If you’re sad, laugh. If you’re bleeding inside, dance.

Maya Angelou

One of my lungs is half gone, and the other half, because I smoked for years, has a lesion. So I can’t swim anymore and had the swimming pool covered over. Now it’s what I call the dance pavilion, and so I and my friends sit out and put music on and watch people dance.

Maya Angelou

One of the problems we have as writers is we don’t take ourselves seriously while writing; being serious is setting aside a time and saying if it comes, good; if it doesn’t come, good, I’ll just sit here.

Maya Angelou

Poetry and music are the best at the highest level of the human mind. Out of poetry, out of their need for poetry, human beings have developed the idea of God. And so when we sing, when we dance, when we speak poetry we are speaking out of God’s mouth, each other out of the music from God’s heart.

Maya Angelou

The best comfort food will always be greens, cornbread, and fried chicken.

Maya Angelou

The black kids, the poor white kids, Spanish-speaking kids, and Asian kids in the US – in the face of everything to the contrary, they still bop and bump, shout and go to school somehow. Their optimism gives me hope.

Maya Angelou