Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time.
Maya Angelou
Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at it destination full of hope.
Maya Angelou
Most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity of opportunity to be otherwise.
Maya Angelou
Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.
Maya Angelou
My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.
Maya Angelou
My life has been one great big joke, a dance that's walked a song that's spoke, I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself.
Maya Angelou
My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.
Maya Angelou
Nothing will work unless you do.
Maya Angelou
One isn't necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.
Maya Angelou
Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.
Maya Angelou
Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.
Maya Angelou
Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.
Maya Angelou
Some critics will write 'Maya Angelou is a natural writer' - which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.
Maya Angelou
The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.
Maya Angelou
The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerance. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors, and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.
Maya Angelou
The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.
Maya Angelou
The need for change bulldozed road down the center of my mind.
Maya Angelou
The sadness of the women's movement is that they don't allow the necessity of love. See, I don't personally trust any revolution where love is not allowed.
Maya Angelou
There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.
Maya Angelou
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
Maya Angelou
There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.
Maya Angelou
There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.
Maya Angelou
We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.
Maya Angelou
We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.
Maya Angelou
