Nature has no mercy at all. Nature says, “I’m going to snow. If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that’s tough. I am going to snow anyway.”
I want all my senses engaged. Let me absorb the world’s variety and uniqueness.
Alone, all alone Nobody, but nobody Can make it out here alone.
Being a woman is hard work.
When I passed forty I dropped pretense, ’cause men like women who got some sense.
I try to live what I consider a “poetic existence.” That means I take responsibility for the air I breathe and the space I take up. I try to be immediate, to be totally present for all my work.
I speak to the black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition.
Language. I loved it. And for a long time I would think of myself, of my whole body, as an ear.
All great artists draw from the same resource: the human heart, which tells us that we are all more alike than we are unalike.
Some critics will write ‘Maya Angelou is a natural writer’ – which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.
While the rest of the world has been improving technology, Ghana has been improving the quality of man’s humanity to man.
I am convinced that words are things, and we simply don’t have the machinery to measure what they are. I believe that words are tangible things...
A wise woman wishes to be no one’s enemy; a wise woman refuses to be anyone’s victim.
The truth is you never can leave home. You take it with you everywhere you go. It’s under your skin. It moves the tongue or slows it, colors the thinking, impedes upon the logic.
Achievement brings its own anticlimax.
Life loves the liver of it.
I’m just someone who likes cooking and for whom sharing food is a form of expression.
I believe that every person is born with talent.
The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself.
Try to live your life in a way that you will not regret years of useless virtue and inertia and timidity.