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Action(s)
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A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.
-Maya Angelou
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Anger
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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
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Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.
-Maya Angelou
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Belief
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I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water.
-Maya Angelou
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Change
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If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain.
-Maya Angelou
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The need for change bulldozed road down the center of my mind.
-Maya Angelou
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Children
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Of all the needs (there are none imaginary) a lonely child has, the one that must be satisfied, if there is going to be hope and a hope of wholeness, is the unshaken need for an unshakable God.
-Maya Angelou
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Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.
-Maya Angelou
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Death
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I answer the heroic question Death where is thy sting? It is here in my heart and mind and memories
-Maya Angelou
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Defeat
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We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.
-Maya Angelou
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Despair
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At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.
-Maya Angelou
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Education
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Education helps one case cease being intimidated by strange situations.
-Maya Angelou
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The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination, as are intelligence and necessity when unblunted by formal education.
-Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, ch. 29, 1969
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God
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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.
-Maya Angelou
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Hope
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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
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Humor
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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
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Ignorance & Stupidity
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It is only out of ignorance that people are cruel, because they really don
-Maya Angelou
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Journeys
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All of childhood's unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.
-Maya Angelou
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Life
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Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: I'm with you kid. Let's go.
-Maya Angelou
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Life loves the liver of it.
-Maya Angelou
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There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.
-Maya Angelou
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Literary
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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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Love
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A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning's greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications. Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent.
-Maya Angelou
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Men & Women
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The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn't need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder -- in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.
-Maya Angelou
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Nature
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Nature has no mercy at all. Nature says, I'm going to snow. If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that's tough. I am going to snow anyway.
-Maya Angelou
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Books by and about Maya Angelou