I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

by Maya Angelou

"When you learn, teach," she said frequently. "When you get, give."

“We are more alike than we are unalike!"

I was going to look like one of the sweet little white girls who were everybody's dream of what was right with the world.

In cotton-picking time the late afternoons revealed the harshness of Black Southern life, which in the early morning had been softened by nature's blessing of grogginess, forgetfulness and the soft lamplight.

Boys? No, rather men who were covered with graves' dust and age without beauty or learning.

For a few seconds it was a tossup over whether I would laugh (imagine being named Hallelujah) or cry (imagine letting some white woman rename you for her convenience).

Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.

small children could no more resist licking the icings than their mothers could avoid slapping the sticky fingers.

Looking straight up at the uneven circle of sky, I began to sense that I might be falling into a blue cloud, far away. The children's voices and the thick odor of food cooking over open fire were the hooks I grabbed just in time to save myself.

I liked her for being able to fall in the sky and admit it. I suggested, “Let's try together. But we have to sit up straight on the count of five.” Louise asked, “Want to hold hands? Just in case?” I did. If one of us did happen to fall, the other could pull her out.

This was surely the time to laugh. We lost but we hadn't lost anything.

I don't think she understood half of what she was saying herself, but, after all, girls have to giggle, and after being a woman for three years I was about to become a girl.

which concrete angel glued to what country seat had decided that if my brother wanted to become a lawyer he had to first pay penance for his skin by picking cotton and hoeing corn and studying correspondence books at night for twenty years?

It was awful to be Negro and have no control over my life. It was brutal to be young and already trained to sit quietly and listen to charges brought against my color with no chance of defense.

It seemed terribly unfair to have a toothache and a headache and have to bear at the same time the heavy burden of Blackness.

What child can resist a mother who laughs freely and often, especially if the child's wit is mature enough to catch the sense of the joke?

Occasionally we were taken to Chinese restaurants or Italian pizza parlors. We were introduced to Hungarian goulash and Irish stew. Through food we learned that there were other people in the world.

“We are the victims of the world's most comprehensive robbery. Life demands a balance.

We learned to slide out of one language and into another without being conscious of the effort. At school, in a given situation, we might respond with “That's not unusual.” But in the street, meeting the same situation, we easily said, “It be's like that sometimes.”

I went further than forgiving the clerk, I accepted her as a fellow victim of the same puppeteer.

She comprehended the perversity of life, that in the struggle lies the joy.

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

The bright hours when the young rebelled against the descending sun had to give way to twenty-four-hour periods called “days” that were named as well as numbered.