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I believe what I have to say is important, and I believe the people coming to hear me are important, and so the occasion of itself alone has an importance, which forces me to stare down my nerves.

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
Alone
Occasion
Force
Nerves
Important
Staring
Believe
Occasions
People
Forces
Importance
Coming
Hear
Stare

More quotes by Maya Angelou

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Not everything you do is going to be a masterpiece, but you get art there and you try and sometimes it really happens. The other times you’re just stretching your soul.
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It is a no-fail, incontrovertible reality: If you get, give. If you learn, teach. You can't do anything with that except do it.
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The charitable say in effect, 'I seem to have more than I need and you seem to have less than you need. I would like to share my excess with you.' Fine, if my excess is tangible, money or goods, and fine if not, for I learned that to be charitable with gestures and words can bring enormous joy and repair injured feelings.
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Life is going to give you just what you put in it. Put your whole heart in everything you do, and pray, then you can wait.
Maya Angelou
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Without willing it, I had gone from being ignorant of being ignorant to being aware of being aware. And the worst part of my awareness was that I didn't know what I was aware of. I knew I knew very little, but I was certain that the things I had yet to learn wouldn't be taught to me at George Washington High School.
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Tell the truth and not the facts.
Maya Angelou
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There is a kind of strength that is almost frightening in Black women. It's as if a steel rod runs right through the head down to the feet.
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Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us. We need hours of aimless wandering or spates of time sitting on park benches, observing the mysterious world of ants and the canopy of treetops.
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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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As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.
Maya Angelou
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Everybody born comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory.
Maya Angelou
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A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but a woman called by a devaluing name will only be weakened by the misnomer.
Maya Angelou
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Y’all dropped the ball and you should be shamed.
Maya Angelou
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I'm a serious aficionada of country music - Reba McEntire, Toby Keith, Montgomery Gentry. I've even written some songs. They haven't done anything of mine yet. But it's only a matter of time.
Maya Angelou
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I respect myself and insist upon it from everybody. And because I do it, I then respect everybody, too.
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There is an amazing something in the American psyche which speaks about courage, and it says, 'Yes I can,' ... Yes, we will overcome it all because we have the spirit to do so.
Maya Angelou
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You can't get too high for somebody to bring you down.
Maya Angelou
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Hope is born again in the faces of children.
Maya Angelou
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We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans - because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings.
Maya Angelou
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We agreed that great men and women should be forced to live as long as possible. The reverence they enjoyed was a life sentence, which they could neither revoke nor modify.
Maya Angelou