The Heart of a Woman Quotes

“Don't let the man bring you down.”
― Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman

“If more Africans had eaten missionaries, the continent would be in better shape.”
― Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman

“Intelligence always had a pornographic influence on me.”
― Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman

“Can I do it? I'd rather not try and fail."

"That's stupid talk, Maya. Every try will not succeed. But if you're going to live, live at all, your business is trying. And if you fail once, so what? Old folks say, Every shuteye ain't sleep and every goodbye ain't gone. You fail, you get up and try again.”
― Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman

“I had to trust life, since I was young enough to believe that life loved the person who dared to live it.”
― Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman

“You can't get too high for somebody to bring you down.”
― Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman

“If I survived at all, it would be a triumph. If I swam, it would be a miracle. As I unlocked my door, I thought of my mother putting her age back fifteen years and going into the merchant marines. I had to try. If I ended in defeat, at least I would be trying. Trying to overcome was black people's honorable tradition.”
― Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman

“Every person under the sound of my voice is a soldier. You are either fighting for your freedom or betraying the fight for freedom or enlisted in the army to deny somebody else freedom.”
― Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman

“The black mother perceives destruction at every door, ruination at each window, and even she herself is not beyond her own suspicion. She questions whether she loves her children enough- or more terribly, does she love them too much? Do her looks cause embarrassment- or even terrifying, is she so attractive her sons begin to desire her and her daughters begin to hate her. If she is unmarried, the challenges are increased. Her singleness indicates she has rejected or has been rejected by her mate. Yet she is raising children who will become mates. Beyond her door, all authority is in the hands of people who do not look or think or act like her children. Teachers, doctors, sales, clerks, policemen, welfare workers who are white and exert control over her family’s moods, conditions and personality, yet within the home, she must display a right to rule which at any moment, by a knock at the door, or a ring in the telephone, can be exposed as false. In the face of this contradictions she must provide a blanket of stability, which warms but does not suffocate, and she must tell her children the truth about the power of white power without suggesting that it cannot be challenged.”
― Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman

“Rev. [Martin Luther] King continued, chanting, singing his prophetic litany. We were one people, indivisible in the sight of God, responsible to each other and for each other.

We, the black people, the most displaced, the poorest, the most maligned and scourged, we had the glorious task of reclaiming the soul and saving the honor of the country. We, the most hated, must take hate into our hands and by the miracle of love, turn loathing into love. We, the most feared and apprehensive, must take fear and by love, change it into hope. We, who die daily in large and small ways, must take the demon death and turn it into Life.

His head was thrown back and his words rolled out with the rumbling of thunder. We had to pray without ceasing and work without tiring. We had to know evil will not forever stay on the throne. That right, dashed to the ground, will rise, rise again and again.”
― Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman

“Youthful cynicism is sad to observe, because it indicates not so much knowledge learned from bitter experiences as insufficient trust even to attempt the future.”
― Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman

“she must provide a blanket of stability, which warms but does not suffocate, and she must tell her children the truth about the power of white power without suggesting that it cannot be challenged.”
― Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman

“America was aptly described by George Bernard Shaw, who said that it was ‘the only country which had gone from barbarism to decadence without once passing through civilization.”
― Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman

“It was the awakening summer of 1960 and the entire country was in labor. Something wonderful was about to be born, and we were all going to be good parents to the welcome child. Its name was Freedom.”
― Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman

“Malcolm stood at the microphone. ‘Every person under the sound of my voice is a soldier. You are either fighting for your freedom or betraying the fight for freedom or enlisted in the army to deny somebody else’s freedom.’ His voice, deep and textured, reached through the crowd, across the street to the tenement windows where listeners leaned half their bodies out into the spring air. ‘The black man has been programmed to die. To die either by his own hand, the hand of his brother or at the hand of a blue-eyed devil trained to do one thing: take the black man’s life.’ The”
― Maya Angelou, The Heart Of A Woman

“Black orators, more eloquent than Genet, had informed white Americans for three centuries that our living conditions were intolerable. David Walker in 1830 and Frederick Douglass in 1850 had revealed the anguish and pain of life for blacks in the United States. Martin Delaney and Harriet Tubman, Marcus Garvey and Dr. DuBois, and Martin King and Malcolm X had explained with anger, passion and persuasion that we were living precariously on the ledge of life, and that if we fell, the entire structure, which had prohibited us living room, might crumble as well.

So in 1960, white Americans should have known all they needed to know about black Americans.”
― Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman

“Intelligence always had a pornographic influence on me. He”
― Maya Angelou, The Heart Of A Woman

“If I wanted to write, I had to be willing to develop a kind of concentration found mostly in people awaiting execution. I had to learn technique and surrender my ignorance.”
― Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman

“Maybe the cops have got him."

The knowledge of what police do to black men rose wraithlike before my eyes.”
― Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman

“[Martin Luther King, Jr.] said the South we might remember is gone. There was a new South. A more violent and ugly South, a country where our white brothers and sisters were terrified of change, inevitable change. They would rather scratch up the land with bloody fingers and take their most precious document, the Declaration of Independence, and throw it in the deepest ocean, bury it under the highest mountain, or burn it in the most flagrant blaze, than admit justice into a seat at the welcome table, and fair-play room in a vacant inn.”
― Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman

“I asked why he was so angry all the time. I told him that while I agreed with Alabama blacks who boycotted bus companies and protested against segregation, California blacks were thousands of miles, literally and figuratively, from those Southern plagues.

"Girl, don't you believe it. Georgia is Down South. California is Up South. If you're black in this country, you're on a plantation. You have to deal with masters. There might be some argument over whether they are vicious masters, but be assured that they all think they are masters . . . And if they think that, then you'd better believe they think you are the slave. Maybe a smart slave, a pretty slave, a good slave, but a slave just the same.”
― Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman

“The black mother perceives destruction at every door, ruination at each window, and even she herself is not beyond her own suspicion.”
― Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman

“I tell you what to do. Go to Manhattan tomorrow. Go first to Times Square. You’ll see the same people you used to see in Arkansas. Their accents might be different, their dress might be different, but if they are American whites, they’re all Southern crackers. Then go to Harlem. Harlem is the largest plantation in this country. You’ll see lawyers in three-piece suits, real estate brokers in mink coats, pimps in white Cadillacs, but they’re all sharecropping. Sharecropping on a mean plantation.”
― Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman

“Because the white world demonstrated in every possible way that he, a black boy, had to live within the murdering boundaries of racial restrictions, I had raised him to believe that he had a say in the living of his life, and that barring accidents, he should have a say in the dying of his death.”
― Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman

“Why did she want to go to sea and live the rough unglamorous life of a seaman? ‘Because they told me Negro women couldn’t get in the union. You know what I told them?’ I shook my head, although I nearly knew. ‘I told them, “You want to bet?” I’ll put my foot in that door up to my hip until women of every color can walk over my foot, get in that union, get aboard a ship and go to sea.”
― Maya Angelou, The Heart Of A Woman

“I had never felt that Egypt was really Africa, but now that our route had taken us across the Sahara, I could look down from my window seat and see trees, and bushes, rivers and dense forest. It all began here. The jumble of poverty-stricken children sleeping in rat-infested tenements or abandoned cars. The terrifying moan of my grandmother, ‘Bread of Heaven, Bread of Heaven, feed me till I want no more.’ The drugged days and alcoholic nights of men for whom hope had not been born. The loneliness of women who would never know appreciation or a mite’s share of honor. Here, there, along the banks of that river, someone was taken, tied with ropes, shackled with chains, forced to march for weeks carrying the double burden of neck irons and abysmal fear. In that large clump of trees, looking like wood moss from the plane’s great height, boys and girls had been hunted like beasts, caught and tethered together. Sacrificial lambs on the altar of greed. America’s period of orgiastic lynchings had begun on yonder broad savannah.”
― Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman

“The Blacks was a white foreigner’s idea of a people he did not understand. Genet had superimposed the meanness and cruelty of his own people onto a race he had never known, a race already nearly doubled over carrying the white man’s burden of greed and guilt, and which at the same time toted its own insufficiency. I threw the manuscript into a closet, finished with Genet and his narrow little conclusions. Max”
― Maya Angelou, The Heart Of A Woman

“Black folks can't change cause white folks won't change.”
― Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman

“Did he insult you? I mean us, the race?"

"Not directly. Like most white racists, he was paternalistic. I would have preferred he slap me than that he talk down upon me. Then I could retaliate in kind.”
― Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman

“Hell, if you're born black in the United States, you're suspect of being everything, except white, of course.”
― Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman