You know that.” - From an Academy of Achievement interview, January 22, 1997.ġ1. In truth, you know to be kind, to be courteous, to be fair. That is a fashion, but the proper thing, the good thing to do, you already know. Maybe you shouldn't wear short pants or short skirts or go without a shirt or go without a tie. “I always write about my life 15 or 20 years later then I can tell the truth about what happened, rather than the facts.” - From an AP interview, June 1986.ġ0. You can’t do it.” - From an address at Skidmore College, March 1993.ĩ. “I never trust anyone who says they love me if they say that they don’t love themselves. Less pressure than that, its coal, less than that, its fossilized leaves are just plain dirt.” - From a commencement address at Wellesley College, June 8, 1982.Ĩ. But I do know that a diamond, one of the most precious elements in this planet, certainly one in many ways the hardest, is the result of extreme pressure, and time. But it is important to remember that it may be necessary to encounter defeat, I don’t know. You will be challenged mightily, and you will fall many times. “It is upon you to increase your virtue, the virtue of courage-it is upon you. I would try to lead the children into seeing that human beings are more alike than we are unalike.” - From an AP interview, October 1995.ħ. “I would encourage the child to look at her his world, at the people in their world, and to try to examine the cultures in their world without fear. I like to write, try to write, so that the readers think they’re thinking that up.” - From an AP interview, November 1981.Ħ. “I like to write so that the readers are 30 pages into the book before they realize they’re reading. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues." - From an interview with George Plimpton in The Paris Review, Fall 1990.ĥ. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. “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 work at the language.” - From an interview with George Plimpton in The Paris Review, Fall 1990.Ĥ. Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. Of course, there are those critics-New York critics as a rule-who say, Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer. It must look easy, but it takes me forever to get it to look so easy. “Nathaniel Hawthorne says, ‘Easy reading is damn hard writing.’ I try to pull the language in to such a sharpness that it jumps off the page. “here is no thing so powerful as an idea whose time has come…there is no person so right as one who struggles for the rights of others.” - From a commencement address at Oberlin College, May 30, 1983.ģ. "You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them." - From Letter to My Daughter, 2008.Ģ. Let’s remember the poet, author, singer, and thinker with some of her most memorable quotes.ġ. The poem’s conclusion states that laughter is still the best medicine: “When old folks laugh, they consider the promise / of dear painless death, and generously / forgive life for happening / to them.Today would have been Maya Angelou’s 89th birthday. In the poem “ Old Folks Laugh,” included in her 1997 collection of poetry, I Shall Not Be Moved, she made clear that her advice about laughter wasn’t just about not taking yourself too seriously. If you’re serious, you really understand that it’s important that you laugh as much as possible and admit that you’re the funniest person you ever met. I think, “You’re not serious you’re boring as hell.” And you know, I never trust people who don’t laugh, who said, “I am serious” and act as if they put airplane glue on the back of their hands and stuck the glue to their foreheads. They could make you laugh in the worst of times, and they did so. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were brothers. “I don’t.”Īs recently as last year, she expanded on that wisdom again, when speaking to Anderson Cooper on CNN: A 1998 report of her visit to the University of Buffalo included that idea: “Don’t trust people who don’t laugh,” she told the audience, after speaking about a painful time in her own life. It was a piece of advice she dispensed frequently often over the years, particularly when speaking to young people. Still, Angelou repeatedly took the chance to remind others about the importance of laughter. Not every moment in the life of Maya Angelou, the prolific writer who died today at 86, was something to laugh at: as TIME’s Lev Grossman recounts in his remembrance, her youth was a period marred by abuse and suffering.
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