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" While the rest of the world has been improving technology, Ghana has been improving the quality of man's humanity to man. "

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" Autobiography is awfully seductive; it's wonderful. Once I got into it, I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass - the slave narrative - speaking in the first-person singular, talking about the first-person plural, always saying 'I,' meaning 'we.' "

" I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine... before she realizes she's reading. "

" If you want what you're saying heard, then take your time and say it so that the listener will actually hear it. You might save somebody's life. Your own, first. "

" It is a no-fail, incontrovertible reality: If you get, give. If you learn, teach. You can't do anything with that except do it. "

" That's the biggest gift I can give anybody: 'Wake up, be aware of who you are, what you're doing and what you can do to prevent yourself from becoming ill.' "

" I think we all have empathy. We may not have enough courage to display it. "

" The best comfort food will always be greens, cornbread, and fried chicken. "

" Living in a state of terror was new to many white people in America, but black people have been living in a state of terror in this country for more than 400 years. "

" I wasn't a pretty girl. I was six feet tall at 15, you know. "

" Growing up, I decided, a long time ago, I wouldn't accept any manmade differences between human beings, differences made at somebody else's insistence or someone else's whim or convenience. "

" 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. "

" You are the sum total of everything you've ever seen, heard, eaten, smelled, been told, forgot - it's all there. Everything influences each of us, and because of that I try to make sure that my experiences are positive. "

" In a long meter hymn, a singer - they call it 'lays out a line.' And then the whole church joins in in repeating that line. And they form a wall of harmony so tight, you can't wedge a pin between it. "

" If you're serious, you really understand that it's important that you laugh as much as possible and admit that you're the funniest person you ever met. You have to laugh. Admit that you're funny. Otherwise, you die in solemnity. "

" Most people don't grow up. It's too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That's the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don't grow up. "

" The first decade of the twentieth century was not a great time to be born black and poor and female in St. Louis, Missouri, but Vivian Baxter was born black and poor, to black and poor parents. Later she would grow up and be called beautiful. As a grown woman she would be known as the butter-colored lady with the blowback hair. "

" Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope. "

" And if a person is religious, I think it's good, it helps you a bit. But if you're not, at least you can have the sense that there is a condition inside you which looks at the stars with amazement and awe. "

" We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated. "

" At one time, you could sit on the Rue de la Paix in Paris or at the Habima Theater in Tel Aviv or in Medina and you could see a person come in, black, white, it didn't matter. You said, 'That's an American' because there's a readiness to smile and to talk to people. "

" I agree with Balzac and 19th-century writers, black and white, who say, 'I write for money.' Yes, I think everybody should be paid handsomely; I insist on it, and I pay people who work for me, or with me, handsomely. "

Black And White

" The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind. "

" In the flush of love's light, we dare be brave. And suddenly we see that love costs all we are, and will ever be. Yet it is only love which sets us free. "

" The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerance. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors, and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance. "

" I don't know how much longer I'll be around. I'll probably be writing when the Lord says, 'Maya, Maya Angelou, it's time.' "

" I was a dancer for many years. I was a premier dancer with 'Porgy and Bess,' the opera. And I taught dance some, in different places. "

" I'm not a writer who teaches. I'm a teacher who writes. "

" I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best - I mean, when I'm at my best - of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything. "

" At one time in my life, from the time I was seven until I was about 13, I didn't speak. I only spoke to my brother. The reason I didn't speak: I had been molested, and I told the name of the molester to my brother who told it to the family. "

" I always knew from that moment, from the time I found myself at home in that little segregated library in the South, all the way up until I walked up the steps of the New York City library, I always felt, in any town, if I can get to a library, I'll be OK. It really helped me as a child, and that never left me. "