Quotes from Maya Angelou

To be allowed, no, invited into the private lives of strangers, and to share their joys and fears, was a chance to exchange the Southern bitter wormwood for a cup of mead with Beowulf or a hot cup of tea and milk with Oliver Twist.

This book has been written to examine some of the ways love heals and helps a person to climb impossible heights and rise from immeasurable depths.

If you must look back, do so forgivingly. If you will look forward, do so prayerfully. But the wisest course would be to be present in the present gratefully.

Will I be less dead because I wrote this poem or you more because you read it long years hence.

The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.

Seek the fashion which truly fits and befits you. You will always be in fashion if you are true to yourself, and only if you are true to yourself.

I have made many mistakes and no doubt will make more before I die. When I have seen pain, when I have found that my ineptness has caused displeasure, I have learned to accept my responsibility and to forgive myself first, then to apologize to anyone injured by my misreckoning. Since I cannot in-live history, and repentance is all I can offer God, I have hopes that my sincere apologies were accepted.

You have no idea what your legacy will be because your legacy is every life you touch.

For what can stand against me, since one person, with God, constitutes a majority?

Tragedy, no matter how sad, becomes boring to those not caught in its addictive caress.

Even if they were society's pariahs, they were going to be angels in a marble white heaven and sit on the right hand of Jesus, the Son of God.

Later he explained that when a person is beating you you should scream as loud as possible; maybe the whipper will become embarrassed or else some sympathetic soul might come to your rescue.