Maya Angelou

Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time.

The customs are as formalised as an eighteenth-century minuet, and a child at the race's knee learns the moves and twirls by osmosis and observation.

I had given up some youth for knowledge, but my gain was more valuable than the loss

The___ word and the ___ word are like poison, whether you take poison from a vial or pour it into Bavarian crystal, it is still poison.

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.

When things were very bad his soul just crawled behind his heart and curled up and went to sleep

You can__ use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.

You can't use up creativity. The more you use the more you have.

Because of the routines we follow, we often forget that life is an ongoing adventure. . . Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art: to bring all our energies to each encounter, to remain flexible enough to notice and admit when what we expected to happen did not happen. We need to remember that we are created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed.

You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.

What is a fear of living? It's being preeminently afraid of dying. It is not doing what you came here to do, out of timidity and spinelessness. The antidote is to take full responsibility for yourself - for the time you take up and the space you occupy. If you don't know what you're here to do, then just do some good.

I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.

People whose history and future were threatened each day by extinction considered that it was only by divine intervention that they were able to live at all. 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 a commensurate speed.

Each time a woman stands up for herself, without knowing it possibly, without claiming it, she stands up for all women.

Words are things. You must be careful, careful about calling people out of their names, using racial pejoratives and sexual pejoratives and all that ignorance. Don__ do that. Some day we__l be able to measure the power of words. I think they are things. They get on the walls. They get in your wallpaper. They get in your rugs, in your upholstery, and your clothes, and finally in to you.

Go," she whispered. "Go. Show them you spell your name W-O-M-A-N.

Frequently, I have been asked how I got to be this way. How did I, born black in a white country, poor in a society where wealth is adored and sought after at all costs, female in an environment where only large ships and some engines are described favourably by using the female pronoun-how did I get to be Maya Angelou?

She said, 'No, you learned that you have power - power and determination. I love you and I am proud of you. With those two things, you can go anywhere and everywhere.