Children By Maya Angelou Quotes & Sayings

I know why the caged bird sings. — Maya Angelou

The children to whom we read simple stories may or may not show gratitude, but each boon we give strengthens the pillars of the world. — Maya Angelou

Each child belongs to all of us and they will bring us a tomorrow in direct relation to the responsibility we have shown to them. — Maya Angelou

Strictly speaking, one cannot legislate love, but what one can do is legislate fairness and justice. If legislation does not prohibit our living side by side, sooner or later your child will fall on the pavement and I'll be the one to pick her up. Or one of my children will not be able to get into the house and you'll have to say, "Stop here until your mom comes here." Legislation affords us the chance to see if we might love each other. — Maya Angelou

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. — Maya Angelou

I took out my first library card ... I spent most of my Saturdays at the library (no interruptions) breathing in the world of penniless shoeshine boys who, with goodness and perseverance, became rich, rich men, and gave baskets of goodies to the poor on holidays. The little princesses who were mistaken for maids, and the long-lost children mistaken for waifs, became more real to me than our house, our mother, our school or Mr. Freeman — Maya Angelou

I believe in living a poetic life, an art full life. Everything we do from the way we raise our children to the way we welcome our friends is part of a large canvas we are creating. — Maya Angelou

I am a child of God. I always carry that with me. — Maya Angelou

Sometimes guns really matter. Protecting those who need protection - children, women, minorities in rough parts of town, old folks living in places where cops aren't nearby. Guns are true empowerment for the powerless. — Maya Angelou

I've learned that regardless of your relationship with your parents, you'll miss them when they're gone from your life. — Maya Angelou

there are times when no one is right, and sometimes among family and children, no one can admit that there is no right, and that maybe at the same time there is no wrong. But in this case I was wrong and I appreciate Vivian Baxter for being big enough to accept my apology. — Maya Angelou

Home is that youthful region where a child is the only real living inhabitant. Parents, siblings, and neighbors are mysterious apparitions who come, go, and do strange unfathomable thing in and around the child, the region's only enfranchised citizen. — Maya Angelou

The city became for me the ideal of what I wanted to be as a grown-up. Friendly, but never gushing, cool but not frigid or distant, distinguished without the awful stiffness. — Maya Angelou

I believed that there was a God because I was told it by my grandmother and later by other adults. But when I found that I knew not only that there was God but that I was a child of God, when I understood that, when I comprehended that, more than that, when I internalized that, ingested that, I became courageous. — Maya Angelou

I was raped when I was very young. I told my brother the name of the person who had done it. Within a few days the man was killed. In my child's mind
seven and a half years old
I thought my voice had killed him. So I stopped talking for five years. — Maya Angelou

Some entertainers have tried to make art of coarseness, but in their public crudeness they have merely revealed their own vast senses of personal inferiority. When they heap mud upon themselves and allow their tongues to wag with vulgarity, they expose their belief that they are not worth loving and in fact are unlovable. When we as an audience indulge then in their profanity, we are like the audience at the Roman Colosseum being thrilled as the raging lions kill the unarmed Christians. We not only participate in the humiliation of the entertainers, but we are brought low by sharing in the obscenity. We need to have the courage to say obesity is not funny and vulgarity is not amusing. Insolent children and submissive parents are not the characters we want to admire and emulate. Flippancy and sarcasm are not qualities which we need to include in our daily conversations. — Maya Angelou

You dwell in whitened castles
with deep and poisoned moats
and cannot hear the curses
which fill your children's throats. — Maya Angelou

The gold of her promise
has never been mined

Her borders of justice
not clearly defined

Her crops of abundance
the fruit and the grain

Have not fed the hungry
nor eased that deep pain

Her proud declarations
are leaves on the wind

Her southern exposure
black death did befriend

Discover this country
dead centuries cry

Erect noble tablets
where none can decry

"She kills her bright future
and rapes for a sou

Then entraps her children
with legends untrue"

I beg you

Discover this country

from America — Maya Angelou

Many believe that they need company at any cost, and certainly if a thing is desired at any cost, it will be obtained at all costs. We need to remember and to teach our children that solitude can be a much-to-be-desired condition. Not only is it acceptable to be alone, at times it is positively to be wished for. It is in the interludes between being in company that we talk to ourselves. In the silence we listen to ourselves. Then we ask questions of ourselves. We describe ourselves, and in the quietude we may even hear the voice of God — Maya Angelou

Most people don't grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging. — Maya Angelou

We saw beyond our seeming
These days of bloodied screaming
Of children dying bloated
Out where the lilies floated
Of men all noosed and dangling
Within the temples strangling
Our guilt grey fungus growing
We knew and lied our knowing
Deafened and unwilling
We aided in the killing
And now our souls lie broken
Dry tablets without token. — Maya Angelou

My mother is so full of joy and life. I am her child. And that is better than being the child of anyone else in the world. — Maya Angelou

Whenever I want to laugh, I read a wonderful book, 'Children's Letters to God.' You can open it anywhere. One I read recently said, 'Dear God, thank you for the baby brother, but what I prayed for was a puppy.' — Maya Angelou

I would ask every man and every woman who's had the blessing of having children, 'Would you deny your son or your daughter the ecstasy of finding someone to love?' To love someone takes a lot of courage. So how much more is one challenged when the love is of the same sex and the laws say, 'I forbid you from loving this person'? — Maya Angelou

Hope is born again in the faces of children. — Maya Angelou

My greatest blessing has been the birth of my son. My next greatest blessing has been my ability to turn people into children of mine. — Maya Angelou

What I think it really means is: I'm a teacher. I am a teacher. I teach all the time, as you do and as all of you do-whether we know it or not, whether we take responsibility for it or not. I hold nothing back because I want to see that light go off. I like to see the children say, 'I never thought of that before.' And I think, 'I've got them!' — Maya Angelou

Like most children, I thought if I could face the worst danger voluntarily, and triumph, I would forever have power over it. — Maya Angelou

If you happen to be white in a white country; pretty according to the dictates of fashion; rich in a country where money is adored, it's almost impossible to grow up and to grow up honest inside. It is almost impossible. Most people don't grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging. But to grow up, to take responsibility for the time you take up, and the space you occupy, to honor every living person for his or her humanity, that is to grow up. — Maya Angelou

Nikhilananda's birthday. Maybe we'd Morris dance, naked, around the base of an old-growth California redwood, its branches lavishly festooned with the soiled hammocks and poop buckets of crunchy-granola tree sitters mentoring spotted owls in passive-resistance protest techniques. You get the picture. In place of Santa Claus, my mom and dad said Maya Angelou kept tabs on whether little children were naughty or nice. Dr. Angelou, they warned me, did her accounting on a long hemp scroll of names, and if I failed to turn my compost I'd be sent to bed with no algae. Me, I just wanted to know that someone wise and carbon neutral - Dr. Maya or Shirley Chisholm or Sean Penn - was paying attention. But none of that was really Christmas. And none of that Earth First! baloney helps out once you're dead and you discover that the snake-handling, — Chuck Palahniuk

When the human race neglects its weaker members, when the family neglects its weakest one - it's the first blow in a suicidal movement. I see the neglect in cities around the country, in poor white children in West Virginia and Virginia and Kentucky - in the big cities, too, for that matter. — Maya Angelou

In Stamps the segregation was so complete that most Black children didn't really, absolutely know what whites looked like. — Maya Angelou

The God of my childhood was an old, white, Vandyck-bearded Father Time, who roared up thunder, then puffed out His cheeks and blew down hurricanes on His errant children. He could be placated only if one fell prostrate, groveled and begged for mercy. I didn't like that God, but He did seem more real than a Maker who was just thought and spirit. I wished for a Someone in between. — Maya Angelou

I am convinced that most people do not grow up ... We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies, and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are innocent and shy as magnolias. — Maya Angelou

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. We should all be dead. I thought I should like to see us all dead, one on top of the other. A pyramid of flesh with the whitefolks on the bottom, as the broad base, then the Indians with their silly tomahawks and teepees and wigwams and treaties, the Negroes with their mops and recipes and cotton sacks and spirituals sticking out of their mouths. The Dutch children should all stumble in their wooden shoes and break their necks. The French should choke to death on the Louisiana Purchase (1803) while silkworms ate all the Chinese with their stupid pigtails. As a species, we were an abomination. All of us. — Maya Angelou

We must re-create an attractive and caring attitude in our homes and in our worlds. If our children are to approve of themselves, they must see that we approve of ourselves. If we persist in self-disrespect and then ask our children to respect themselves, it is as if we break all their bones and then insist that they win Olympic gold medals for the hundred-yard dash.
Outrageous. — Maya Angelou