Maya Angelou Quotes — Page 24

Poet, Memoirist

Love

“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.”

Stars Wall Ocean

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Maya Angelou

Poet, Memoirist

Creative

“I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine ... before she realizes she's reading.”

Writing Book Reading

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Grateful

“I am grateful to be a woman. I must have done something great in another life.”

Done Grateful

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Grateful

“When we give cheerfully and accept gratefully, everyone is blessed.”

Gratitude Thanksgiving

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Courageous

“What is a fear of living? It's being preeminently afraid of dying. It is not doing what you came here to do, out of timidity and spinelessness. The antidote is to take full responsibility for yourself - for the time you take up and the space you occupy. If you don't know what you're here to do, then just do some good.”

Responsibility Space Positive

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Wise

“When the storyteller tells the truth, she reminds us that human beings are more alike than unalike... A story is what it's like to be a human being-to be knocked down and to miraculously arise. Each one of us has arisen, awakened. We do rise.”

Writing Stories Down And

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Philosophical

“Talent is like electricity. We don't understand electricity. We use it.”

Writing Use

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Nostalgic

“Cooking certain dishes, like roast pork, reminds me of my mother.”

Mother Cooking

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Motivated

“We are growing up. We are growing up! Out of the idiocies - the ignorances of racism and sexism and ageism and all those ignorances.”

Growing Up Ignorance Racism

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Creative

“All people in the world - who are not hermits or mutes - speak words. They speak different languages, but they speak words. They say, "How are you" or "I'm not feeling well" all over the world. These common words - these common elements that we have between us - the writer has to take some verbs and nouns and pronouns and adjectives and adverbs and arrange them in a way that sound fresh.”

People Feelings Sound

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Courageous

“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.”

Country Life Sports

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Adventurous

“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.”

Art Life Adventure

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