The voices / 279 fragments

Maya Angelou

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

Author and source reference ↗

▷ Play this voice Search within this voice ↗Place in time ↗love courage time life death peace wisdom work

Archive entries

01Undated

I couldn't tell fact from fiction,Or if the dream was trueMy only sure predictionIn this world was you.I'd touch your features inchly. Beard love and dared the cost, The sented spiel reeled me unreal And I found my senses lost.

Maya Angelou / quote

02Undated

Making a decision to write was a lot like deciding to jump into a frozen lake.

Maya Angelou / quote

03Undated

What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat,’.... And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come.

Maya Angelou / quote

04Undated

When I am writing, I am trying to find out who I am, who we are, what we're capable of, how we feel, how we lose and stand up, and go on from darkness into darkness. I'm trying for that. But I'm also trying for the language. I'm trying to see how it can really sound. I really love language. I love it for wate it does for us, how it allows us to explain the pain and the glory, the nuances and delicacies of our existence. And then it allows us to laugh, allows us to show wit. Real wit is shown in language. We need language.

Maya Angelou / quote

05Undated

I speak to the Black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition--about what we can endure, dream, fail at and survive.

Maya Angelou / quote

06Undated

We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.

Maya Angelou / quote

07Undated

Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently.

Maya Angelou / quote

08Undated

When we give cheerfully and accept gratefully, everyone is blessed.

Maya Angelou / quote

09Undated

Whining is not only graceless, but can be dangerous. It can alert a brute that a victim is in the neighborhood.

Maya Angelou / quote

10Undated

I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.

Maya Angelou / quote

11Undated

Segregation shaped me education liberated me.

Maya Angelou / quote

12Undated

My mother's gifts of courage to me were both large and small. The latter are woven so subtly into the fabric of my psyche that I can hardly distinguish where she stops and I begin.

Maya Angelou / quote

13Undated

There were people who went to sleep last night, poor and rich and white and black, but they will never wake again. And those dead folks would give anything at all for just five minutes of this weather or ten minutes of plowing. So you watch yourself about complaining. What you're supposed to do when you don't like a thing is change it. If you can't change it, change the way you think about it.

Maya Angelou / quote

14Undated

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

Maya Angelou / quote

15Undated

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.

Maya Angelou / quote

16Undated

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?

Maya Angelou / quote

17Undated

A friend may be waiting behind a stranger's face.

Maya Angelou / quote

18Undated

I dreamt we walked together along the shore. We made satisfying small talk and laughed. This morning I found sand in my shoe and a seashell in my pocket. Was I only dreaming?

Maya Angelou / quote

19Undated

Every person under the sound of my voice is a soldier. You are either fighting for your freedom or betraying the fight for freedom or enlisted in the army to deny somebody else freedom.

Maya Angelou / quote

20Undated

Don't let the man bring you down.

Maya Angelou / quote

21Undated

We, the black people, the most displaced, the poorest, the most maligned and scourged, we had the glorious task of reclaiming the soul and saving the honor of the country. We, the most hated, must take hate into our hands and by the miracle of love, turn loathing into love. We, the most feared and apprehensive must take fear and by love, change it into hope. We, who die daily in large and small ways, must take the demon death and turn it into life.-Martin Luther King Jr.

Maya Angelou / quote

22Undated

To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power. Or the climbing, falling colors of a rainbow.

Maya Angelou / quote

23Undated

It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.

Maya Angelou / quote

24Undated

That knowledge humbles me, melts my bones, closes my ears, and makes my teeth rock loosely in their gums. And it also liberates me. I am a big bird winging over high mountains, down into serene valleys. I am ripples of waves on silver seas. I'm a spring leaf trembling in anticipation.

Maya Angelou / quote