Maya Angelou quotes

Everything in this society is geared to keeping a black boy from growing to manhood. You've got to let him try for himself.

Georgia is Down South. California is Up South. If you're black in this country, you're on a plantation.

I deserved everything beautiful and I merited putting my long black feet on Oriental carpets as much as Lady Astor.

If I wanted to write, I had to be willing to develop a kind of concentration found mostly in people awaiting execution.

Trying to overcome was black people's honorable tradition.

I love you, Mom. Maybe now you'll have a chance to grow up.

there were too many old females and not nearly enough women.

They shot me and said my fighting days were over, but if I am paralyzed and can only lift my eyelids, I will stare the white oppressors out of Africa.

They spell my name W-O-M-A-N, 'cause the difference between a female and a woman is the difference between shit and shinola.

It was the awakening summer of 1960 and the entire country was in labor. Something wonderful was about to be born, and we were all going to be good parents to the welcome child. Its name was Freedom.

We, the most hated, must take hate into our hands and by the miracle of love, turn loathing into love.

My son could rely on my love, but never expect our lives to be unchanging.

Accepting the first drink from a strange man is very much like a nice girl having sex on a first date.

I still admired and appreciated him. I even loved him, I simply was not in love with him.

It'll be O.K., Mom. Don't cry. I love you, Mom. Lots of people love you.

Anyway, if more Africans had eaten more missionaries, the Continent would be in better shape.

A man's supposed to be in charge. That's the order of nature.

Indifference became the mattress we lay on, so our sexual sharings disintegrated into unsatisfying periods of hasty and uncomfortable rubbings.

I didn't know then that all wives of freedom fighters lived their lives on the edge of screaming desperation.

He respects you. And maybe for an African, that's better than love.

Oh, but we knew them with the intimacy of a surgeon's scalpel.

We, in Kenya, are women, not just wombs. We have shown during Mau Mau that we have ideas as well as babies.

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Life doesn’t frighten me at all.