Gather Together in My Name Quotes

“Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.”
― Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name

“The naturally lonely person does not look for comfort in love, but accepts the variables as due course.”
― Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name

“Never let white folks know what you really think. If you’re sad, laugh. If you’re bleeding inside, dance.”
― Maya Angelou, Gather Together In My Name

“Upon reflection, I marvel that no one saw through me enough to bundle me off to the nearest mental institution. The fact that it didn't happen depended less on my being a good actress than the fact that I was surrounded, as I had been all my life, by strangers.”
― Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name

“I found it hard to think of leaving my books. They had been my elevators out of the midden, and to whom could I entrust such close friends?”
― Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name

“I thought at the time that it was noble to bear the ills one had silently. But not so silently that others didn't know one was bearing them.”
― Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name

“Be the best of anything you get into. If you want to be a whore, it's your life. Be a damn good one. Don't chippy at anything. Anything worth having is worth working for.'
It was her version of Polonius' speech to Laertes. With that wisdom in my pouch, I was to go out and buy my future.”
― Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name

“Grief works its way on people differently. Some sulk, or become morose, or weep and scream a vengeance at the gods.”
― Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name

“There is a much-loved region in the American fantasy where pale white women float eternally under black magnolia trees, and white men with soft hands brush wisps of wisteria from the creamy shoulders of their lady loves. Harmonious black music drifts like perfume through this precious air, and nothing of a threatening nature intrudes.

The South I returned to, however, was flesh-real and swollen-belly poor.”
― Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name

“I stood dumfounded, founded in dumbness.”
― Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name

“Despite the sarcastic remarks of Northerners, who don't know the region (read Easterners, Westerners, North Easterners, North Westerners, Midwesterners), the South of the United States can be so impellingly beautiful that sophisticated creature comforts diminish in importance.”
― Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name

“Boys seem to think that girls hold the keys to all happiness, because the female is supposed to have the right of consent and/or dissent. I've heard older men reflect on their youth, and an edge of hostile envy drags across their voices as they conjure up the girls who whetted but didn't satisfy their sexual appetites. It's interesting that they didn't realize in those yearning days past, nor even in the present days of understanding, that if the female had the right to decide, she suffered from her inability to instigate. That is, she could only say yer or no if she was asked.
She spends half her time making herself attractive to men, and the other half trying to divine which of the attracted are serious enough to marry her, and which wish to ram her against the nearest wall and jab into her recklessly, then leave her leaning, legs trembling, cold wet evidence running down her inner thigh. Which one will come to her again, proud to take her to his friends, and which will have friends who only know of her as the easy girl with good (or even bad) poontang?
The crushing insecurity of youth, and the built-in suspicion between the sexes, militate against the survival of the species, and yet, men do legalize their poking, and women do get revenge their whole lives through for the desperate days of insecurity and bear children so that the whole process remains in process.
Alas.”
― Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name

“His words never rushed but were selected, chewed over, released into the air as if the best choice possible had been made.”
― Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name

“There was no need to discuss racial prejudice. Hadn't we all, black and white, just snatched the remaining Jews from the hell of concentration camps? Race prejudice was dead. A mistake made by a young country. Something to be forgiven as an unpleasant act committed by an intoxicated friend.”
― Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name

“Everybody was a hero. Hadn't we all joined together to kick the hell out of de Gruber, and that fat Italian, and put that little rice-eating Tojo in his place?

Black men from the South who had held no tools more complicated than plows had learned to use lathes and borers and welding guns, and had brought in their quotas of war-making machines. Women who had only known maid's uniforms and mammy-made dresses donned the awkward men's pants and steel helmets, and made the ship-fitting sheds hum some buddy. Even the children had collected paper, and at the advice of elders who remembered World War I, balled the tin foil from cigarettes and chewing gum into balls as big as your head. Oh, it was a time.”
― Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name

“Self-pity in its early stage is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable. Curly”
― Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name

“I was seventeen, very old, embarrassingly young,”
― Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name

“I should have known better than to lie to the government. People always said Uncle Sam would spend a thousand dollars to get you if you stole a three-cent stamp from him. He was more revengeful than God.”
― Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name

“Self pity in its early stage is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable”
― Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name

“I felt as if I were blowing my breath against a tornado.”
― Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name

“A smile struggled free and limped across his lips.”
― Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name

“The heavy opulence of Dostoevsky's world was where I had lived forever. The gloomy, lightless interiors, the complex ratiocinations of the characters and their burdensome humors, were as familiar to me as loneliness.”
― Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name

“I gave in to sadness because I had no choice.”
― Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name

“If you want to stay around here like death eating a soda cracker, that's your business.”
― Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name

“Thus we lived through a major war. The questions in the ghettos was, can we make it through a minor peace?”
― Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name

“But the Russian writers would be packed away in mothballs and stored in our basement. I would savor the idea of Dostoevsky’s, Tolstoy’s and Gorki’s volumes molding in the dank cellar, wisps of camphor and odors of wet earth floating above them.”
― Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name

“Remember if you decide for the Army, I’ll support you. If you decide to be a whore, all I can say is, be the best. Don’t be a funky chippy. Go with class.’ She”
― Maya Angelou, Gather Together In My Name

“I had agreed with her that I should start collecting the Dial records featuring Bird, Max Roach, Al Haig, Bud Powell, Dizzy Gillespie and others who she said were going to be the ‘masters.’ Each payday I kept out enough money to pay my own way at Mother’s, and spent the rest on records and books.”
― Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name

“Self-pity in its early stage is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.”
― Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name

“He looked at me squarely, forcing me to face my fears. "Now My, if you're happy being miserable, enjoy it, but don't ask me to feel sorry for you. Just get all down in it and wallow around. Take your time to savor all its subtleties, but don't come to me expecting sympathy.”
― Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name