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."

"I'm not a writer who teaches. I'm a teacher who writes."

"Most people don't grow up. It's too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That's the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don't grow up."

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

"The truth is, no one of us can be free until everybody is free."

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

"Find a beautiful piece of art. If you fall in love with Van Gogh or Matisse or John Oliver Killens, or if you fall love with the music of Coltrane, the music of Aretha Franklin, or the music of Chopin - find some beautiful art and admire it, and realize that that was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less."

"While the rest of the world has been improving technology, Ghana has been improving the quality of man's humanity to man."

"Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage."

"It is impossible to struggle for civil rights, equal rights for blacks, without including whites. Because equal rights, fair play, justice, are all like the air: we all have it, or none of us has it. That is the truth of it."

"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.'"

"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."

"At one time, you could sit on the Rue de la Paix in Paris or at the Habima Theater in Tel Aviv or in Medina and you could see a person come in, black, white, it didn't matter. You said, 'That's an American' because there's a readiness to smile and to talk to people."

"Courage - you develop courage by doing small things like just as if you wouldn't want to pick up a 100-pound weight without preparing yourself."

"Encouragement to all women is - let us try to offer help before we have to offer therapy. That is to say, let's see if we can't prevent being ill by trying to offer a love of prevention before illness."

"History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again."

"I did work in a strip club, but I didn't strip. I danced, and I became very popular."

"I have great respect for the past. If you don't know where you've come from, you don't know where you're going. I have respect for the past, but I'm a person of the moment. I'm here, and I do my best to be completely centered at the place I'm at, then I go forward to the next place."

"I keep a hotel room in my town, although I have a large house. And I go there at about 5:30 in the morning, and I start working. And I don't allow anybody to come in that room. I work on yellow pads and with ballpoint pens. I keep a Bible, a thesaurus, a dictionary, and a bottle of sherry. I stay there until midday."

"I know that one of the great arts that the writer develops is the art of saying, 'No. No, I'm finished. Bye.' And leaving it alone. I will not write it into the ground. I will not write the life out of it. I won't do that."

"I learned a long time ago the wisest thing I can do is be on my own side, be an advocate for myself and others like me."

"I never expected anyone to take care of me, but in my wildest dreams and juvenile yearnings, I wanted the house with the picket fence from June Allyson movies. I knew that was yearning like one yearns to fly."

"I respect myself and insist upon it from everybody. And because I do it, I then respect everybody, too."

"I speak to the black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition."

"I think we all have empathy. We may not have enough courage to display it."

"I was very blessed to have family and friends, but particularly family, who told me I was not only all right, I was just right, so I believe that my brain is a good one, and it's lasting me very well."

"I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right."

"I'm just like you - I want to be a good human being. I'm doing my best, and I'm working at it. And I'm trying to be a Christian. I'm always amazed when people walk up to me and say, 'I'm a Christian.' I always think, 'Already? You've already got it?' I'm working at it. And at my age, I'll still be working at it at 96."

"I'm working at trying to be a Christian, and that's serious business. It's like trying to be a good Jew, a good Muslim, a good Buddhist, a good Shintoist, a good Zoroastrian, a good friend, a good lover, a good mother, a good buddy - it's serious business."

"I've always written. There's a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother's papers were destroyed. I'd written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then."

"I've learned that you shouldn't go through life with a catcher's mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw something back."

"If we lose love and self respect for each other, this is how we finally die."

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

"If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded."

"If you have only one smile in you give it to the people you love."

"In all my work, I try to say - 'You may be given a load of sour lemons, why not try to make a dozen lemon meringue pies?'"

"In the flush of love's light, we dare be brave. And suddenly we see that love costs all we are, and will ever be. Yet it is only love which sets us free."

"Information helps you to see that you're not alone. That there's somebody in Mississippi and somebody in Tokyo who all have wept, who've all longed and lost, who've all been happy. So the library helps you to see, not only that you are not alone, but that you're not really any different from everyone else."

"Life loves the liver of it."

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

"Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time."

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

"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."

"My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors."

"Nothing succeeds like success. Get a little success, and then just get a little more."

"Nothing will work unless you do."

"Once you appreciate one of your blessings, one of your senses, your sense of hearing, then you begin to respect the sense of seeing and touching and tasting, you learn to respect all the senses."