Maya: You may write me down in history. With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt. But still, like dust, I'll rise.
Maya: Each of us has the right and the responsibility to asses the road which lie ahead and those over which we have traveled, and if the feature road looms ominous or unpromising, and the road back uninviting-inviting, then we need to gather our resolve and carrying only the necessary baggage, step off that road into another direction. If the new choice is also unpalatable, without embarrassment, we must be ready to change that one as well.
Maya: Each of us has that right, that possibility, to invent ourselves daily. If a person does not invent herself, she will be invented. So, to be bodacious enough to invent ourselves is wise.
Maya: Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time.
Maya: The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.
Maya: Love builds up the broken wall and straightens the crooked path. love keeps the stars in the firmament and imposes rhythm on the ocean tides each of us is created of it and I suspect each of us was created for it.
Maya: I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.
Maya: When we cast our bread upon the waters, we can presume that someone downstream whose face we will never know will benefit from our action, as we who are downstream from another will profit from that grantor's gift.
Maya: The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.
Maya: You can only become truly accomplished at something you love. Don't make money your goal. Instead, pursue the things you love doing, and then do them so well that people can't take their eyes off you.
Maya: I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
Maya: I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.
Maya: When you learn, teach. When you get, give.
Maya: Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.
Maya: We all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry, and we must understand that all the threads of the tapestry are equal in value no matter what their color.
There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.
Maya: The need for change bulldozed road down the center of my mind.
Maya: Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.
Maya: Of all the needs (there are none imaginary) a lonely child has, the one that must be satisfied, if there is going to be hope and a hope of wholeness, is the unshaken need for an unshakable God.
Maya: My life has been one great big joke, a dance that's walked a song that's spoke, I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself.
Maya: Life loves the liver of it.
Maya: If you have only one smile in you, give it to the people you love.
Maya: If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform a million realities.
Maya: I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water.
Maya: I am overwhelmed by the grace and persistence of my people
Maya: Education helps one cease being intimidated by strange situations.
Maya: Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.
Maya: 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.
Maya: All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened.
Maya: A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning's greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications. Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent.
Maya: Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.
Maya: If you have only one smile in you, give it to the people you love. Don't be surly at home, then go out in the street and start grinning 'Good morning' at total strangers.
Maya: There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure truth.
Maya: I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life's a bitch. You've got to go out and kick ass.
Maya: Some critics will write 'Maya Angelou is a natural writer' - which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.
Maya: The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn't need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder -- in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.
Maya: If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat.
Maya: You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.
Maya: If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain.
Maya: Human beings are more alike than unalike, and what is true anywhere is true everywhere, yet I encourage travel to as many destinations as possible for the sake of education as well as pleasure.
Maya: Alone, all alone Nobody, but nobody Can make it out here alone.
Maya: Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.
Maya: The main thing in one's own private world is to try to laugh as much as you cry.
Maya: Love is that condition in the human spirit so profound that it allows me to survive, and better than that, to thrive with passion, compassion, and style.
Maya: Living a life is like constructing a building: if you start wrong, you'll end wrong.
Maya: I speak to the black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition -- about what we can endure, dream, fail at, and still survive.
Maya: The needs of society determine its ethics.
Maya: It is this belief in a power larger than myself and other than myself which allows me to venture into the unknown and even the unknowable.
On December 1, 2005, Maya Angelou visited the White House, when she delivered her poem, Amazing Peace at the lighting of the National Christmas Tree at the White House.
In 1977, Maya Angelou appeared in the film Roots.
"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings", is a chronicle of Maya Angelous's life up to age sixteen (and ending with the birth of her son, Guy)
Maya Angelou's mother is Vivian Baxter, a nurse and realtor.
As a teenager, Maya Angelou lived car graveyard where other homeless children lived.
Maya Angelou's parents got divorced when she was three years old.
Maya Angelou in her twenties when she performed as a dancer at the Purple Onion cabaret.
In 1964, May Angelou worked alongside Malcolm X and Martin Luther King during the civil rights movement.
She took the name Maya Angelou when she became a cabaret artist in her late twenties.
In 1960, Maya Angelou performed in Genet's "The Blacks" and her own "Cabaret for Freedom".
1954-1955 Maya Angelou toured Europe and Africa in the musical "Porgy and Bess".
Before attending the several universities she went to, Maya was educated in public schools in Arkansas and San Francisco.
Maya was a UNICEF international ambassador in 1996.
Maya is a member of the Director’s Guild of America.
Maya received education from universities in America, Italy, and Ghana.
Maya holds honorary degrees from many universities.
Maya is one of two poets to write original work to be recited at a presidential inauguration.
Her autobiography is a five-volume set.
She wrote twelve books that made the international best seller list.
Maya "has a way of naturally developing beautiful and meaningful phrases" according to talk-show host, Travis Smiley.
Maya feels her job is to present the truth, not to impact others as she does.
Maya feels that humanity is overcome with an 'epidemic of ignorance' and believes that conflicts are caused by a failure to understand each other.
She has a home in Harlem and one in the southern states.
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