"Poetry gave me back my voice...." - Quote by Maya Angelou

“I encourage courtesy. To accept nothing less than courtesy, and to give nothing less than courtesy.”

“Because of our routines we forget that life is an ongoing adventure.”

“The plague of racism is insidious, entering into our minds as smoothly and quietly and invisibly as floating airborne microbes enter into our bodies to find lifelong purchase in our bloodstreams.”

“For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew. I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew.”

“A poet must never make a statement simply because it sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true." - W. H. Auden"A poem...begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness...It finds the thought and the thought finds the words.”

“No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?”

“There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.”

“The most beautiful voice in the world is that of an educated Southern woman.”

“When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have to speak up. You have to say something; you have to do something.”