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When I write, I tend to twist my hair. Something for my small mind to do, I guess.
Maya Angelou
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I love a Hebrew National hot dog with an ice-cold Corona - no lime. If the phone rings, I won't answer until I'm done.
Maya Angelou
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One isn't necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.
Maya Angelou
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It's very important to know the neighbor next door and the people down the street and the people in another race.
Maya Angelou
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How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!
Maya Angelou
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If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities.
Maya Angelou
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The only thing is, people have to develop courage. It is most important of all the virtues. Because without courage, you can't practice any other virtues consistently.
Maya Angelou
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I believe that each of us comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory.
Maya Angelou
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I became the kind of parent my mother was to me.
Maya Angelou
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I agree with Balzac and 19th-century writers, black and white, who say, 'I write for money.' Yes, I think everybody should be paid handsomely; I insist on it, and I pay people who work for me, or with me, handsomely.
Maya Angelou
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If we accept being talked to any kind of a way, then we are telling ourselves we are not quite worth the best. And if we have the effrontery to talk to anybody with less than courtesy, we tell ourselves and the world we are not very intelligent.
Maya Angelou
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I'm happy to be a writer - of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn't a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.
Maya Angelou
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I love the song 'I Hope You Dance' by Lee Ann Womack. I was going to write that song, but someone beat me to it.
Maya Angelou
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In a long meter hymn, a singer - they call it 'lays out a line.' And then the whole church joins in in repeating that line. And they form a wall of harmony so tight, you can't wedge a pin between it.
Maya Angelou
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Fighting for one's freedom, struggling towards being free, is like struggling to be a poet or a good Christian or a good Jew or a good Muslim or good Zen Buddhist. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up the next morning with the job still to be done. So you start all over again.
Maya Angelou
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I'm considered wise, and sometimes I see myself as knowing. Most of the time, I see myself as wanting to know. And I see myself as a very interested person. I've never been bored in my life.
Maya Angelou
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The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerance. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors, and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.
Maya Angelou
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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.
Maya Angelou
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I do like to have guns around. I don't like to carry them. But I like - if somebody is going to come into my house and I have not put out the welcome mat, I want to stop them.
Maya Angelou
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Elimination of illiteracy is as serious an issue to our history as the abolition of slavery.
Maya Angelou
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I wasn't a pretty girl. I was six feet tall at 15, you know.
Maya Angelou
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Timidity makes a person modest. It makes him or her say, 'I'm not worthy of being written up in the record of deeds in heaven or on earth.' Timidity keeps people from their good. They are afraid to say, 'Yes, I deserve it.'
Maya Angelou
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Glory falls around us as we sob a dirge of desolation on the Cross and hatred is the ballast of the rock
Maya Angelou
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I don't think there's such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.
Maya Angelou
