• Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: "I'm with you kid. Let's go."
• If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain.
• Effective action is always unjust.
• Nothing will work unless you do.
• 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.
• Ask for what you want and be prepared to get it.
• If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. - from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
• 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 acceptance.
• The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn't need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder -- in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.
• Talent is like electricity. We don't understand electricity. We use it. You can plug into it and light up a lamp, keep a heart pump going, light a cathedral, or you can electrocute a person with it.
• Some critics will write 'Maya Angelou is a natural writer' - which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.
• Lyrical poetry is out for the time being, and something that is called rap or hip-hop is in. It is still poetry, and we can't live without it. We need language to tell us who we are, how we feel, what we're capable of -- to explain the pains and glory of our existence.
