Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas
Maya Angelou
Top 10 Best Quotes
“There is a shock that comes so quickly and strikes so deep that the blow is internalized even before then skin feels it. The strike must first reach bone marrow, then ascend slowly to the brain where the slowpoke intellect records the deed.”
“Ah, Momma. I had never looked at death before, peered into its yawning chasm for the face of a beloved. For days my mind staggered out of balance. I reeled on a precipice of knowledge that even if I were rich enough to travel all over the world, I would never find Momma. If I were as good as God’s angels and as pure as the Mother of Christ, I could never have Momma’s rough slow hands pat my cheek or braid my hair. Death to the young is more than that undiscovered country; despite its inevitability, it is a place having reality only in song or in other people's grief.”
“Why do you dislike people?" "I didn't say I disliked people. Not to like people isn't the same as to dislike them." He sounded profound and I needed time to mull over that idea.”
“A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning's greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications.”
“A smart man only tells half of what he thinks.”
“There were glamorous young men with dyed hair who rustled like old cellophane. Older men had airs of sophistication and cold grace, giving the impression that if they were not so terribly tired they would go to places (known only to a select few) where the conversation was more scintillating and the congregation more interesting. There were young women who had the exotic sheen of recently fed forest animals. Although they moved their fine heads languorously this way and that, nothing in the room excited their appetites. Unfashionable red lips cut across their white faces, and the crimson fingernails, as pointed as surgical instruments, heightened the predatory effect. Older, sadder women were more interesting to me. Voluminous skirts and imported shawls did not hide their heavy bodies, nor was their unattractiveness shielded by the clanks of chains and ribbons of beads, or by pale pink lips and heavily drawn doe eyes. Their presence among the pretty people enchanted me. It was like seeing frogs buzzed by iridescent dragonflies.”
“The images had been provided by movies, books and Pathe News, and none included a six-foot tall Black woman hovering either in the back or in the foreground.”
“She was white, wore perfume and smiled openly with the Negro customers, so I knew she was sophisticated. Other people's sophistication tended to make me nervous and I stayed shy of Louise.”
“My dear, I have known since I was a small boy on a hill in Greece that when I met you, you’d never tell me who you were, you would give another name. Equally beautiful and equally mystical. But I would know you by the music in your voice and the shadow of the forest on your beautiful face.”
“Death to the young is more than that undiscovered country; despite its inevitability, it is a place having reality only in song or in other people's grief.”
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Book Keywords:
human, emotion, death, words, shock, glamour, grandmothers, exoticism, women, thoughts, beauty, ptsd, pretense, loss, white-privilege, intelligence, imposter-syndrome, age, race-relations, feeling, change, black-women, adulthood, youth, people, misanthropy, humanity, sophistication, speaking, grief, nervousness, mourning, men, relationships, behaviour, thinking, dislikes, likes, trauma
