Maya Angelou inspired and moved millions with her writing. While we could tell of her great talent and her spectacular outlook on life, we thought it best to let her have the last word.
Wisdom from Maya Angelou
“You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.”
“I’ve learned you can tell a lot about about a person by the way she handles three things: a rainy day, lost luggage and tangled Christmas tree lights.”
“My mission in life is not merely to to survive, but to thrive; and do so with some passion, some compassion, some humour and some style.”
“I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life is a bitch. You’ve got to go out and kick ass.”
“Nothing will work unless you do.”
“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
“Nothing can dim the light that shines from within.”
“Try to be a rainbow in someone’s cloud.”
Maya Angelou’s advice on writing
“The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.”
“I try to remember times in my life, incidents in which there was the dominating theme of cruelty, or kindness, or generosity, or envy, or happiness, glee … perhaps four incidents in the period I’m going to write about. Then I select the one that lends itself best to my device and that I can write as drama without falling into melodrama.”
“If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind. I promised myself that I would write as well as I can, tell the truth, not to tell everything I know, but to make sure that everything I tell is true, as I understand it.”
“Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it’s right, it’s easy. It’s the other way round, too. If it’s slovenly written, then it’s hard to read. It doesn’t give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.”
“I know when it’s the best I can do. It may not be the best there is. Another writer may do it much better. But I know when it’s the best I can do. I know that one of the great arts that the writer develops is the art of saying, No. No, I’m finished. Bye. And leaving it alone. I will not write it into the ground. I will not write the life out of it. I won’t do that.”
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
“I really love language. I love it for what it does for us, how it allows us to explain the pain and the glory, the nuances and delicacies of our existence. And then it allows us to laugh, allows us to show wit. Real wit is shown in language. We need language.”
