“A certain person wondered why a big strong girl like me wouldn't keep a job which paid a normal salary. I took my time to lead her and to read her every page. Even minimal people can't survi...”
Author detail
Maya Angelou (born Marguerite Annie Johnson) was an American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, and several books of poetry, and was credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years. She received dozens of awards and more than 50 honorary degrees. She became a poet and writer after a series of occupations as a young adult, including fry cook, prostitute, nightclub dancer and performer, cast member of the opera Porgy and Bess, coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and journalist in Egypt and Ghana during the decolonization of Africa. She was an actor, writer, director, and producer of plays, movies, and public television programs. In 1982, she earned the first lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She was active in the Civil Rights movement, and worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. Source: Wikipedia
Quotes
Showing 61-80 of 324
“A certain person wondered why a big strong girl like me wouldn't keep a job which paid a normal salary. I took my time to lead her and to read her every page. Even minimal people can't survi...”
“I find relief from the questions only when I concede that I am not obliged to know everything. I remind myself it is sufficient to know what I know, and that what I know, may not always be t...”
0 likes
“It was awful to be Negro and have no control over my life. It was brutal to be young and already trained to sit quietly and listen to charges brought against my color with no chance of defen...”
“Ah, Momma. I had never looked at death before, peered into its yawning chasm for the face of a beloved. For days my mind staggered out of balance. I reeled on a precipice of knowledge that e...”
“সুশ্রী মহিলারা বিস্মিত হয় আমার রহস্যটা কি ভেবে। আমার নেই কোন আকর্ষণ কিংবা শারিরীক সৌষ্ঠব। যেমন থাকে ফ্যাশন মডেলদের, কিন্তু যখন ওদের শোনাই আমার গল্প, ওরা ভাবে আমি বুঝি বানিয়ে বলছি। আমি বলি, স...”
0 likes
“Making a decision to write was a lot like deciding to jump into a frozen lake.”
0 likes
“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,...”
0 likes
“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...”
0 likes
“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.”
0 likes
“When we give cheerfully and accept gratefully, everyone is blessed.”
0 likes
“Whining is not only graceless, but can be dangerous. It can alert a brute that a victim is in the neighborhood.”
“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 th...”
0 likes
“There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.”
0 likes
“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.”
“My mind, it was certain, was a well-oiled mechanism which worked swiftly and seminoiselessly. I often competed with radio contestants on quiz programs and usually won hands down in my living...”
“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?”
0 likes
“He was a simple man who had no inferiority complex about his lack of education, and even more amazing no superiority complex because he had succeeded despite that lack.”
“Segregation shaped me; education liberated me.”
0 likes
“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.”
0 likes
“Whatever you want to do, if you want to be great at it, you have to love it and be able to make sacrifices for it.”
0 likes