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I've had people explain to me what one of my poems meant, and I've been surprised that it means that to them. If a person can use a poem of mine to interpret her life or his life, good. I can't control that. Nor would I want to.

Maya Angelou

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Maya Angelou
Age: 86 †
Born: 1928
Born: April 4
Died: 2014
Died: May 28
Author
Autobiographer
Comedian
Dancer
Essayist
Film Director
Film Producer
Human Rights Activist
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Politician
St. Louis
Missouri
Marguerite Annie Johnson
Marguerite Johnson
Marguerite Ann Johnson
Marguerite Anne Johnson
Means
Poem
Persons
Explain
Person
Meant
Mean
Mines
Good
Mine
Interpreting
Would
Poetry
Interpret
Life
Control
Poems
People
Use
Surprised

More quotes by 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.
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Achievement brings its own anticlimax.
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Only equals make friends, every other relationship is contrived and off balance.
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I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at commensurate speed.
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Continue. Be loving and be strong. Be fierce and be kind. And don't give in and don't give up.'
Maya Angelou
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I think all poems are commissioned. They just come to me without somebody outside commissioning them. The idea comes and I will live with them 'til I get it as close to what I mean. I've never been totally satisfied. I've come close a few times.
Maya Angelou
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Everyone grows old but not everyone grows up.
Maya Angelou
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It's true. I can do anything and do it well because God loves me. It still humbles me.
Maya Angelou
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If you are going down a road and don't like what's in front of you, and look behind you and don't like what you see, get off the road. Create a new path!
Maya Angelou
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It's wonderful that whenever Patsy Cline's name is mentioned, people's voices fall and they become right sentimental. And, rightly so.
Maya Angelou
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If you have only one smile in you give it to the people you love.
Maya Angelou
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Intelligence always had a pornographic influence on me.
Maya Angelou
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It's very hard for adults to maintain respect and romance so that a love affair can be sustained over years.
Maya Angelou
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Therefore we pledge to bind ourselves to one another, to embrace our lowliest, to keep company with our loneliest, to educate our illiterate, to feed our starving, to clothe our ragged, to do all good things, knowing that we are more than keepers of our brothers and sisters. We are our brothers and sisters
Maya Angelou
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Anger is like fire. It burns all clean.
Maya Angelou
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When we decide to be happy we accept the responsibility to bring happiness to someone else. Some decide that happiness and glee are the same thing, they are not. When we choose happiness we accept the responsibility to lighten the load of someone else and to be a light on the path to another who may be walking in darkness.
Maya Angelou
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Exchange love for hate...Thereby, making the present comfortable and the future promising.
Maya Angelou
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I not only have the right to stand up for myself, but I have the responsibility. I can't ask somebody else to stand up for me if I won't stand up for myself. And once you stand up for yourself, you'd be surprised that people say, Can I be of help?.
Maya Angelou
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We will sometimes have defeats in life but you can have defeats without being defeated, you could fail without being a failure. When you see failure and defeats as merely part of the process to get to when.
Maya Angelou
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Always in the black spirituals there's that promise that things are going to be better, by and by.
Maya Angelou