Maya Angelou Quotes

On Saturday afternoons when all the things are done in the house and there’s no real work to be done, I play Bach and Chopin and turn it up real loudly and get a good bottle of chardonnay and sit out on my deck and look out at the garden.

Whenever I’m around some who is modest, I think, ‘Run like hell and all of fire.’ You don’t want modesty, you want humility.

I’m just someone who likes cooking and for whom sharing food is a form of expression.

There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.

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.

I’m not a writer who teaches. I’m a teacher who writes.

I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool – and I’m not any of those – to say that I don’t write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.

I learned a long time ago the wisest thing I can do is be on my own side, be an advocate for myself and others like me.

Develop enough courage so that you can stand up for yourself and then stand up for somebody else.

Eating is so intimate. It’s very sensual. When you invite someone to sit at your table and you want to cook for them, you’re inviting a person into your life.

Though I do manage to mumble around in about seven or eight languages, English remains the most beautiful of languages. It will do anything.

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.

I was married a few times, and one of my husbands was jealous of me writing.

You are the sum total of everything you’ve ever seen, heard, eaten, smelled, been told, forgot – it’s all there. Everything influences each of us, and because of that I try to make sure that my experiences are positive.

One of my lungs is half gone, and the other half, because I smoked for years, has a lesion. So I can’t swim anymore and had the swimming pool covered over. Now it’s what I call the dance pavilion, and so I and my friends sit out and put music on and watch people dance.

Won’t it be wonderful when black history and native American history and Jewish history and all of U.S. history is taught from one book. Just U.S. history.