Maya Angelou - I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

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Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.

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

Maya Angelou
But what mother and daughter understand each other, or even have the sympathy for each other's lack of understanding?

Maya Angelou
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. It is an unncessary insult.

Maya Angelou
All knowledge is spendable currency, depending on the market.

Maya Angelou
The world had taken a deep breath and was having doubts about continuing to revolve.

Maya Angelou
At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.

Maya Angelou
I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at commensurate speed.

Maya Angelou
The intensity with which young people live demands that they "blank out" as often as possible.

Maya Angelou
She comprehended the perversity of life, that in the struggle lies the joy.

Maya Angelou
The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.

Maya Angelou
Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.

Maya Angelou
The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power.

Maya Angelou
All of childhood's unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.

Maya Angelou
Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity.

Maya Angelou
We are the victims of the world's most comprehensive robbery. Life demands a balance. It's all right if we do a little robbing now.

Maya Angelou
I thought if I could face the worst danger voluntarily, and triumph, I would forever have power over it.

Maya Angelou
In Stamps the segregation was so complete that most Black children didn't really, absolutely know what whites looked like.

Maya Angelou
In order to be profoundly dishonest, a person must have one of two qualities: either he is unscrupulously ambitious, or he is unswervingly egocentric.

Maya Angelou
To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power.

Maya Angelou
The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination, as are intelligence and necessity when unblunted by formal education.

Maya Angelou
Oh, Black known and unknown poets, how often have your auctioned pains sustained us? Who will compute the lonely nights made less lonely by your songs, or by the empty pots made less tragic by your tales? If we were a people much given to revealing secrets, we might raise monuments and sacrifice to the memories of our poets, but slavery cured us of that weakness.

Maya Angelou
I had read a Tale of Two Cities and found it up to my standards as a romantic novel. She opened the first page and I heard poetry for the first time in my life...her voice slid in and curved down trough and over the words. She was nearly singing.

Maya Angelou
Until recently each generation found it more expedient to plead guilty to the charge of being young and ignorant, easier to take the punishment meted out by the older generation (which had itself confessed to the same crime short years before). The command to grow up at once was more bearable than the faceless horror of wavering purpose, which was youth.

Maya Angelou
Hoping for the best, prepared for the worst, and unsurprised by anything in between.

Maya Angelou
Ritie, don't worry 'cause you ain't pretty. Plenty pretty women I seen digging ditches or worse. You smart. I swear to God, I rather you have a good mind than a cute behind.

Maya Angelou
Anything that works against you can also work for you once you understand the Principle of Reverse.

Maya Angelou
That's what you want to do? Then nothing beats a trial but a failure. Give it everything you've got. I've told you many times, 'Can't do is like Don't Care.' Neither of them have a home.

Maya Angelou
You don't have to think about doing the right thing. If you're for the right thing, then you do it without thinking.

Maya Angelou
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 unshaking need for an unshakable God. My pretty Black brother was my Kingdom Come.

Maya Angelou