I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

by Maya Angelou

“We are more alike than we are unalike!"

dirtiness was the inventor of misery.

when a person is beating you you should scream as loud as possible; maybe the whipper will become embarrassed or else some sympathetic soul might come to your rescue.

It was when the owners of cotton fields dropped the payment of ten cents for a pound of cotton to eight, seven and finally five that the Negro community realized that the Depression, at least, did not discriminate.

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with the shades of deeper meaning.”

must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy.

Hadn't He Himself said it would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven?

The scent of decay was sweet and clasping. It groped for life with a hunger both greedy and hateful. But it was hypnotic.

A story went the rounds about a San Franciscan white matron who refused to sit beside a Negro civilian on the streetcar, even after he made room for her on the seat. Her explanation was that she would not sit beside a draft dodger who was a Negro as well. She added that the least he could do was fight for his country the way her son was fighting on Iwo Jima. The story said that the man pulled his body away from the window to show an armless sleeve. He said quietly and with great dignity, “Then ask your son to look around for my arm, which I left over there.”

“Anything that works against you can also work for you once you understand the Principle of Reverse.

The needs of a society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who is offered only the crumbs from his country's table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast.

My tears were not for Bailey or Mother or even myself but for the helplessness of mortals who live on the sufferance of Life.

nothing beats a trial but a failure. Give it everything you've got.

there was nothing a person can't do, and there should be nothing a human being didn't care about.

“Life is going to give you just what you put in it. Put your whole heart in everything you do,

You ask for what you want, and you pay for what you get.

Without willing it, I had gone from being ignorant of being ignorant to being aware of being aware.