A friend posted?on his Facebook this afternoon “brace yourself — Maya Angelou poems are coming”?and I laughed out loud because I was compiling this list when I saw it. And it’s true. Expect
A phenomenon that happens when a notable person dies is that you’ll see people who really knew nothing about the person while he/she was alive will suddenly take an interest. That’s OK. Sometimes we discover someone in death that we never noticed while they were alive. I think if Maya Angelou said anything that helps one person, whether they ever heard of her or not, it would please her.
There may be some repeats in this list. Consider it just double the awesome.
- ?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.?
- ?We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.?
- ?There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.?
- ?While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God’s creation.?
- ?I can be changed by what happens to me. but i refuse to be reduced by it.?
- ?Love life, engage in it, give it all you’ve got. love it with a passion, because life truly does give back, many times over, what you put into it?
- ?Nothing will work unless you do.?
- ?If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.?
- ?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.?
- ?If you have only one smile in you give it to the people you love.?
- ?This is my life. it is my one time to be me. i want to experience every good thing.?
- ?The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.?
- ?I’ve learned that making a “living” is not the same thing as making a “life.”?
- ?If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.?
- ?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.?
- ?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.?
- ?I don’t know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes- it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, ‘well, if I’d known better I’d have done better,’ that’s all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, ‘I’m sorry,’ and then you say to yourself, ‘I’m sorry.’ If we all hold on to the mistake, we can’t see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can’t see what we’re capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one’s own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that’s rough. But you can overcome that. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don’t have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach.?
- ?I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.?
- ?Everything has rhythm. everything dances.?
- ?Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.?
- ?I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.?
- ?Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at it destination full of hope.?
- ?The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.?
- ?Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.?
- ?See, you don’t have to think about doing the right thing if you are for the right thing then you’ll do it without thinking.?
- ?Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time.?
- ?I’ve learned that you shouldn’t go through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw something back.?
- ?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.?
- ?I?believe the most important single thing, beyond discipline and creativity is daring to dare.?
- ?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.?
- ?My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.?
- ?women should be tough, tender, laugh as much as possible and live long lives.?
- ?There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.?
- ?History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.?
- ?Life is a gift, and i try to respond with grace and courtesy.?
- ?Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.?
- ?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.?
- ?A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.?
- ?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.?
- ?When members of a society wish to secure that society’s rich heritage they cherish their arts and respect their artists. The esteem with which we regard the multiple cultures offered in our country enhances our possibilities for healthy survival and continued social development.?
- ?The intensity with which young people live demands that they ?blank out? as often as possible.?
- ?For Africa to me? is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.?
- ?We are only as blind as we want to be.?
- ?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 defense. We should all be dead. I thought I should like to see us all dead, one on top of the other. A pyramid of flesh with the whitefolks on the bottom, as the broad base, then the Indians with their silly tomahawks and teepees and wigwams and treaties, the Negroes with their mops and recipes and cotton sacks and spirituals sticking out of their mouths. The Dutch children should all stumble in their wooden shoes and break their necks. The French should choke to death on the Louisiana Purchase (1803) while silkworms ate all the Chinese with their stupid pigtails. As a species, we were an abomination. All of us.?
- ?I make writing as much a part of my life as I do eating or listening to music.?
- ?It takes the human voice to infuse them with the shades of deeper meaning.?
- ?I couldn’t tell fact from fiction, Or if the dream was true My only sure prediction In this world was you. I’d touch your features inchly. Beard love and dared the cost, The sented spiel reeled me unreal And I found my senses lost.?
- ?To grow up is to stop putting blame on parents.?
- ?My life has been long, and believing that life loves the liver of it, I have dared to try many things, sometimes trembling, but daring, still.?
- ?Life is not measured by the number of breaths you take buy by the moments that take your breath away.?
- ?We may act sophisticated and worldly but I believe we feel safest when we go inside ourselves and find home, a place where we belong and maybe the only place we really do.?
- ?I would like to be known as an intelligent woman, a courageous woman, a loving woman, a woman who teaches by being.?
- ?Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.?
- ?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.?
- ?You should never make someone a priority who views you as an option.?
- ?Life likes to be taken by the lapel and told, ?I’m with you kid. Let’s go!?
- ?You can only become great at something you are willing to sacrifice for.?
- ?If someone shows you who they are, believe them.?
- ?Because of the routines we follow, we often forget that life is an ongoing adventure. . . Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art: to bring all our energies to each encounter, to remain flexible enough to notice and admit when what we expected to happen did not happen. We need to remember that we are created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed.?
- ?Does my sexiness upset you? / Does it come as a surprise / That I dance like I’ve got diamonds / At the meeting of my thighs??
- ?Hope for the best, be prepared for the worse. Life is shocking, but you must never appear to be shocked. For no matter how bad it is it could be worse and no matter how good it is it could be better.?
- ?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. 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 admiration.?
- ?Be wary when a naked person offers you his shirt.?
- ?I don’t believe an accident of birth makes people sisters or brothers. It makes them siblings, gives them mutuality of parentage. Sisterhood and brotherhood is a condition people have to work at.?
- ?You did the best that you knew how. Now that you know better, you’ll do better.?
- ?I’ve learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way (s)he handles these three things: A rainy day, lost luggage and tangled Christmas tree lights.?
- ?My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more intelligent and more educated than college professors.?
- ?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.?
- ?If you don’t like something change it. If you can’t change it, change you’re attitude to it.?
- ?People whose history and future were threatened each day by extinction considered that it was only by divine intervention that they were able to live at all. 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 a commensurate speed.?
- ?Thomas Wolfe warned in the title of America’s great novel that ?You Can’t Go Home Again.? I enjoyed the book but I never agreed with the title. I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and dragons of home under one’s skin, at the extreme corners of one’s eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe. Home is that youthful region where a child is the only real living inhabitant. Parents, siblings, and neighbors, are mysterious apparitions, who come, go, and do strange unfathomable things in and around the child, the region’s only enfranchised citizen. [?] We may act sophisticated and worldly but I believe we feel safest when we go inside ourselves and find home, a place where we belong and maybe the only place we really do.?
- ?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.?
- ?The devil lives in our mistakes, the lord lives in our rights. Who lives in our ignorance, and who wins after all??
- ?While the rest of the world has been improving technology, Ghana has been improving the quality of mans humanity to a man.?
- ?All knowledge is spendable currency, depending on the market.?
- ?What you’re supposed to do when you don’t like a thing is change it. If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it. Don’t complain.?
- ?Faith is the evidence of the unseen.?
- ?We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans ? because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone- because we have the impulse to explain who we are. Not just how tall we are, or thin? but who we are internally? perhaps even spiritually. There’s something, which impels us to show our inner-souls. The more courageous we are, the more we succeed in explaining what we know.?
- ?Let nothing dim the light that shines from within.?
- ?Without courage we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.?
- ?Each time I write a book, every time I face that yellow pad, the challenge is so great. I have written eleven books, but each time I think, ?Uh oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody and they’re going to find me out.?
- ?Words are things. You must be careful, careful about calling people out of their names, using racial pejoratives and sexual pejoratives and all that ignorance. Don’t do that. Some day we’ll be able to measure the power of words. I think they are things. They get on the walls. They get in your wallpaper. They get in your rugs, in your upholstery, and your clothes, and finally in to you.?
- ?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.?
- ?Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future, and renders the present inaccessible.?
- ?Each time a woman stands up for herself, without knowing it possibly, without claiming it, she stands up for all women.?
- ?If more Africans had eaten missionaries, the continent would be in better shape.?
- ?The dread of futility has been my life-long plague.?
- ?You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them. Try to be a rainbow in someone else’s cloud. Do not complain. Make every effort to change things you do not like. If you cannot make a change, change the way you have been thinking. You might find a new solution.?
- ?I’m grateful for being here, for being able to think, for being able to see, for being able to taste, for appreciating love ? for knowing that it exists in a world so rife with vulgarity, with brutality and violence, and yet love exists. I’m grateful to know that it exists.?
- ?If you’re always trying to be Normal you will never know how amazing you can be.?
- ??The desire to reach the stars is ambitious. The desire to reach hearts is wise and most possible.?
- ?Life’s a bitch. You’ve got to go out and kick ass.?
- ?The needs of a society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who is offered only the crumbs from his country’s table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast. Hence the janitor who lives in one room but sports a robin?s-egg-blue Cadillac is not laughed at but admired, and the domestic who buys forty-dollar shoes is not criticized but is appreciated. We know that they have put to use their full mental and physical powers. Each single gain feeds into the gains of the body collective.?
- ?The trouble for the thief is not how to steal the chief’s bugle, but where to blow it.?
- ?Surviving is important, thriving is elegant.?
- ?All great achievements require time.?
- “Nothing will work unless you do.”
- “Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.”
- “Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.”
- “I’m grateful to intelligent people. That doesn’t mean educated. That doesn’t mean intellectual. I mean really intelligent. What black old people used to call ‘mother wit’ means intelligence that you had in your mother’s womb. That’s what you rely on. You know what’s right to do.”
Tiffany Willis is the founder and editor-in-chief of Liberal America. An unapologetic member of the Christian Left, she has spent most of her career actively working with ?the least of these? and disadvantaged and oppressed populations. She’s passionate about their struggles. To stay on top of topics she discusses,?like her?Facebook page,?follow her on Twitter, or?connect with her via LinkedIn. She also has?a?grossly neglected personal blog?and a?literary quotes blog that is a labor of love. Find her somewhere and join the discussion.
