Maya Angelou Quotes
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You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.
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I keep a hotel room in my town, although I have a large house. And I go there at about 5:30 in the morning, and I start working. And I don't allow anybody to come in that room. I work on yellow pads and with ballpoint pens. I keep a Bible, a thesaurus, a dictionary, and a bottle of sherry. I stay there until midday.
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A wise woman wishes to be no one's enemy; a wise woman refuses to be anyone's victim.
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I believe that every person is born with talent.
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The loss of young first love is so painful that it borders on the ludicrous.
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It's one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, to forgive. Forgive everybody.
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During bad circumstances, which is the human inheritance, you must decide not to be reduced. You have your humanity, and you must not allow anything to reduce that. We are obliged to know we are global citizens. Disasters remind us we are world citizens, whether we like it or not.
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Most people don't grow up. It's too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That's the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don't grow up.
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The sadness of the women's movement is that they don't allow the necessity of love. See, I don't personally trust any revolution where love is not allowed.
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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.
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The best comfort food will always be greens, cornbread, and fried chicken.
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Out of the huts of history's shame I rise Up from a past that's rooted in pain I rise I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide, Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
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Growing up, I decided, a long time ago, I wouldn't accept any manmade differences between human beings, differences made at somebody else's insistence or someone else's whim or convenience.
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If you want what you're saying heard, then take your time and say it so that the listener will actually hear it. You might save somebody's life. Your own, first.
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I never expected anyone to take care of me, but in my wildest dreams and juvenile yearnings, I wanted the house with the picket fence from June Allyson movies. I knew that was yearning like one yearns to fly.
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At one time in my life, from the time I was seven until I was about 13, I didn't speak. I only spoke to my brother. The reason I didn't speak: I had been molested, and I told the name of the molester to my brother who told it to the family.
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I have need of a friend.There is one and only one who will give the air from his failing lungs for my body's mend.And that one is my love.
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I know for sure that loves saves me and that it is here to save us all.
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What humility does for one is it reminds us that there are people before me. I have already been paid for. And what I need to do is prepare myself so that I can pay for someone else who has yet to come but who may be here and needs me.
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Nothing succeeds like success. Get a little success, and then just get a little more.
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The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.
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There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.
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You can't forgive without loving. And I don't mean sentimentality. I don't mean mush. I mean having enough courage to stand up and say, 'I forgive. I'm finished with it.'
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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.