Poet Maya Angelou Quotes

When Great Trees Fall When great trees fall, rocks on distant hills shudder, lions hunker down in tall grasses, and even elephants lumber after safety. When great trees fall in forests, small things recoil into silence, their senses eroded beyond fear. When great souls die, the air around us becomes light, rare, sterile. We breathe, briefly. Our eyes, briefly, see with a hurtful clarity. Our memory, suddenly sharpened, examines, gnaws on kind words unsaid, promised walks never taken. Great souls die and our reality, bound to them, takes leave of us. Our souls, dependent upon their nurture, now shrink, wizened. Our minds, formed and informed by their radiance, fall away. We are not so much maddened as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of dark, cold caves. And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.

We need to remember that we are all created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed.

Oh, Black known and unknown poets, how often have your auctioned pains sustained us? Who will compute the lonely nights made less lonely by your songs, or by the empty pots made less tragic by your tales? If we were a people much given to revealing secrets, we might raise monuments and sacrifice to the memories of our poets, but slavery cured us of that weakness.

As Maya Angelou, American author, poet, and self-described Renaissance Woman, wrote, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.

The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher, The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher. They all hear The speaking of the Tree. They hear the first and last of every Tree Speak to humankind today. Come to me, here beside the River. Plant yourself beside the River.

Radical Reflection Avoid meta-shame, which is shame for having so much shame. Take a deep breath of kindness for yourself and your history of body shame/shaming. We can only do what we know. As famed poet Maya Angelou says, “When we know better, we do better.” We can do better by giving ourselves more love.

It may be enough, however, to have it said that we survive in exact relationship to the dedication of our poets (include preachers, musicians, and blues singers).

Being free is as difficult and as perpetual — or rather 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 Moslem or a good Zen Buddhist. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up in the next morning with the job still to be done. So you start all over again.

be deprived of a voice means to be deprived of agency over our own lives. It also means to slowly but systematically become alienated from our own journeys, struggles and inner transformations, and begin to view even our most subjective experiences as though through someone else’s eyes, an external gaze. ‘There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you’, wrote the poet, author and civil rights activist Maya Angelou.

Oh, Black known and unknown poets, how often have your auctioned pains sustained us?

Oh, Black known and unknown poets, how often have your auctioned pains sustained us? Who will compute the lonely nights made less lonely by your songs, or by the empty pots made less tragic by your tales?

A red flag is a red flag.” Hmmm. It took me well over fifty years to learn that one. The hard way. “When someone shows you who they are, believe them,” said the celebrated poet Maya Angelou. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me,” goes the wise saying.

If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. Don’t complain. —Maya Angelou, author and poet Have

It’s normal to feel some level of jealousy, and research shows that in small doses and expressed appropriately, it’s a normal part of healthy relationships. I love how the poet Maya Angelou frames it. “Jealousy in romance is like salt in food. A little can enhance the savor, but too much can spoil the pleasure and, under certain circumstances, can be life-threatening.

While this aspect of self-awareness is no doubt useful, a more consequential side concerns understanding how you affect others and, in turn, what others think of you. As the poet Maya Angelou noted, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.” In that sense, self-awareness is really about other-awareness, and people with higher EQs are better able to understand how their actions affect and are perceived by others.

We were singing for Dr. Du Bois' spirit, for the invaluable contributions he made, for his shining intellect and his courage. To many of us he was the first American Negro intellectual. We knew about Jack Johnson and Jesse Owens and Joe Louis. We were proud of Louis Armstrong and Marian Anderson and Roland Hayes. We memorized the verses of James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Countee Cullen, but they were athletes, musicians and poets, and White folks thought all those talents came naturally to Negroes. So, while we survived because of those contributors and their contributions, the powerful White world didn't stand in awe of them. Sadly, we also tended to take those brilliances for granted. But W.E.B. Du Bois and of course Paul Robeson were different, held on a higher or at least on a different plateau than the others.

13. “We survive in exact relationship to the dedication of our poets,” (this page) Angelou says of Black people. Do you think that this is true of all cultures? 14. The book title is a reference to a poem by Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Why do you think that Angelou chose this title?

I teach poetry to teens, and I always include a picture of the poet on the handout. I want my readers to see Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni. I want them to know what Sandra Cisneros, Natalie Diaz, and Patricia Smith look like. Some will see their reflections looking back at them, others won't. Both are important. Who makes the work is just as important as the work made.

Jobs later explained, “We discussed whether it was correct before we ran it. It’s grammatical, if you think about what we’re trying to say. It’s not think the same, it’s think different. Think a little different, think a lot different, think different. ‘Think differently’ wouldn’t hit the meaning for me.” In order to evoke the spirit of Dead Poets Society, Clow and Jobs wanted to get Robin Williams to read the narration. His agent said that Williams didn’t do ads, so Jobs tried to call him directly. He got through to Williams’s wife, who would not let him talk to the actor because she knew how persuasive he could be. They also considered Maya Angelou and Tom Hanks. At a fund-raising dinner featuring Bill Clinton that fall, Jobs pulled the president aside and asked him to telephone Hanks to talk him into it, but the president pocket-vetoed the request. They ended up with Richard Dreyfuss, who was a dedicated Apple fan. In addition to the television commercials, they created one of the most memorable print campaigns in history. Each ad featured a black-and-white portrait of an iconic historical figure with just the Apple logo and the words “Think Different” in the corner. Making it particularly engaging was that the faces were not captioned. Some of them—Einstein, Gandhi, Lennon, Dylan, Picasso, Edison, Chaplin, King—were easy to identify. But others caused people to pause, puzzle, and maybe ask a friend to put a name to the face: Martha Graham, Ansel Adams, Richard Feynman, Maria Callas, Frank Lloyd Wright, James Watson, Amelia Earhart. Most were Jobs’s personal heroes. They tended to be creative people who had taken risks, defied failure, and bet their career on doing things in a different way.

I have also discovered that Rob has a great admiration for Maya Angelou, the American poet, author, and civil rights activist. His favourite quotation from her is: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

The Strugglers" He was born on a Friday. And it was raining that day. He still does not know whether the Gods were happy or sad at his arriving on earth. He saw the world. He saw sadness. He saw misery. He saw the struggle of his dad and mom. They both struggled to give a good life to their children. He started becoming serious in life. He started winning awards in academics and in quiz competitions to begin with. Then he tried essay competitions and debates. His sole aim was to win awards to make his parents feel proud of him. He wanted to become an IAS officer to make his family (uncles, aunts, cousins) feel proud of him. He came to Delhi to prepare for the Civil Services. He thought he will do a job and not be dependent on his parents, and still clear the Civil Services. It did not happen. He lost out on becoming a Civil Servant of the people. He tried a few odds jobs. He eventually became a Teacher, Poet, and Writer. His inspirations to writing - his Mom who manages to write Poetry even now along with her struggles of life, Sylvia Plath, Maya Angelou, Franz Kafka, Roald Dahl, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Ernest Hemingway, and all the other poets, artists, writers, and strugglers in Life.

The Strugglers" He was born on a Friday. And it was raining that day. He still does not know whether the Gods were happy or sad at his arriving on earth. He saw the world. He saw sadness. He saw misery. He saw the struggle of his dad and mom. They both struggled to give a good life to their children. He started becoming serious in life. He started winning awards in academics and in quiz competitions to begin with. Then he tried essay competitions and debates. His sole aim was to win awards to make his parents feel proud of him. He wanted to become an IAS officer to make his family (uncles, aunts, cousins) feel proud of him. He came to Delhi to prepare for the Civil Services. He thought he will do a job and not be dependent on his parents, and still clear the Civil Services. It did not happen. He lost out on becoming a Civil Servant of the people. He tried a few odds jobs. He eventually became a Teacher, Poet, and Writer. His inspirations to writing - his Mom who manages to writer Poetry even now along with her struggles of life, Sylvia Plath, Maya Angelou, Franz Kafka, Roald Dahl, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Ernest Hemingway, and all the other poets, artists, writers, and strugglers in Life.

ways in which your character is built have to do with all three of those. Those around you, those you choose, and those who choose you.” ― Maya Angelou, Author, Poet, Educator

We were on top again. As always, again. We survived. The depths had been icy and dark, but now a bright sun spoke to our souls. I was no longer simply a member of the proud graduating class of 1940; I was a proud member of the wonderful, beautiful Negro race. Oh, Black known and unknown poets, how often have your auctioned pains sustained us? Who will compute the lonely nights made less lonely by your songs, or by the empty pots made less tragic by your tales? If we were a people much given to revealing secrets, we might raise monuments and sacrifice to the memories of our poets, but slavery cured us of that weakness. It may be enough, however, to have it said that we survive in exact relationship to the dedication of our poets (include preachers, musicians and blues singers).

Maya Angelou spoke of why the caged bird sings and of the courage it takes for literature to crush racism and face trauma. Angelou said the caged bird sings when his wing is bruised and he beats his bars to be free, here’s hoping that every cage be broken through and every bruised wing be healed by the joy of freedom so that it could soar. There are no gardens in prison for the poet to see yet his words make the cage bloom.

If we were a people much given to revealing secrets, we might raise monuments and sacrifice to the memories of our poets, but slavery cured us of that weakness. It may be enough, however, to have it said that we survive in exact relationship to the dedication of our poets

She was a quintessential African-American woman,” as the poet Maya Angelou later said, “born in the small-town repressive South, born of flesh and destined to become iron, born—born a cornflower and destined to become a steel magnolia.

The poet Maya Angelou famously said people will forget what you said and what you did, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel.

There are those who say that poets should use her and his art to change the world. I’d agree with that, but I think everybody should do that. I think the chef and the baker and the candlestick maker – I think everybody should be hoping to make it a better world.

I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life’s a bitch. You’ve got to go out and kick ass. —MAYA ANGELOU, poet and novelist

Of falling leaves and melting snows, of birds In their delights Some poets sing their melodies tendering my nights sweetly.