“No matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow.” When you do the work on yourself, consistently, you become better and can do better for others and for yourself. Don’t just apply this to others, apply it to yourself. Such a simple statement, yet so meaningful. “When you know better, you DO BETTER.” – Maya Angelou ![]() Her interesting and full life, and many different occupations, gave Angelou a beautiful perspective, and a profound love of life and all its intricacies.īelow are some of the most famous quotes of Maya Angelou to inspire you on your own journey to greatness. Her most famous works were her 7 autobiographies, the first- I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings – being the one to bring her international recognition. Maya Angelou was a well-known poet, actress, author and human rights activist. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.12 Empowering Maya Angelou Quotes That Will Inspire You To Greatness The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. We’re especially fond of Angelou’s image of walking the ocean floor and never having to breathe. Can a country capable of such technological inventions not also heal itself of its social division?Ī poem about overcoming fear and not allowing it to master you, ‘Life Doesn’t Frighten Me’ is the perfect poem to conclude this pick of Maya Angelou’s best poems: a powerful declaration of self-belief and the importance of facing one’s fears.Īngelou lists a number of things, from barking dogs to grotesque fairy tales in the Mother Goose tradition, but comes back to her mantra: ‘Life doesn’t frighten me at all’. Playing on the name of her home country, Angelou invites us to reflect on the divisive nature of the ‘United’ States of America – a country in which racial and socio-economic divisions loom large.Īngelou refers to some of the great ‘achievements’ of America, from the Telstar satellite to the atomic bomb. The references to food being gone and rent being due suggest that life is a constant struggle for the Black Americans depicted in the poem, which takes its title from a prominent African-American district in New York. Here’s another poem in which racial inequality is tied to freedom, although poverty is another salient theme of the poem. ![]() The speaker is such a woman, who nevertheless finds something to call her ‘own’ when she looks to the sun, the rain, the oceans, and the mountains: nature’s bounty. This poem is perhaps the best example of this theme in Angelou’s poetry. Another important strand to her work is work itself: a focus on the daily menial tasks which many wives and mothers have to carry out around the home as part of their domestic duties. ![]() Many of Maya Angelou’s best-known poems focus on the plight of women, and specifically Black women. Yet Angelou tells us that the girl in the poem is ‘blameless’, inviting us to read the poem as about ‘mothers’ and ‘daughters’ in a wider sense: it is about the generational shift between African-American women of Angelou’s mother’s age, and those of Angelou’s own generation. The subject of the poem is a girl who goes home to her mother’s arms, afraid and ‘creeping’ because she fears she is in trouble.
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