Sunday, December 23, 2012

Sunday Salute XL


I first read Dr. Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings shortly after it came out.  I found it powerfully moving and I have been a fan ever since. She is truly one of my heroes.
Maya Angelou born Marguerite Ann Johnson; April 4, 1928) is an American author and poet. She has published six autobiographies, five books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning more than fifty years. She has received dozens of awards and over thirty honorary doctoral degrees. Angelou is best known for her series of autobiographies, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her life up to the age of seventeen, and brought her international recognition and acclaim....
When I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was published in 1969, Angelou was hailed as a new kind of memoirist, one of the first African American women who was able to publicly discuss her personal life. According to scholar Hilton Als, up to that point, black female writers were marginalized to the point that they were unable to present themselves as central characters in the literature they wrote. Scholar John McWhorter agreed, seeing Angelou's works, which he called "tracts", as "apologetic writing". He placed Angelou in the tradition of African-American literature as a defense of Black culture, which he called "a literary manifestation of the imperative that reigned in the black scholarship of the period". Writer Julian Mayfield, who called Caged Bird "a work of art that eludes description", has argued that Angelou's autobiographies set a precedent not only for other black women writers, but for African American autobiography as a whole. Als has said that Caged Bird marked one of the first times that a Black autobiographer could, as Als put it, "write about blackness from the inside, without apology or defense".Through the writing of her autobiography, Angelou became recognized and highly respected as a spokesperson for blacks and women. It made her "without a doubt, ... America's most visible black woman autobiographer", and "a major autobiographical voice of the time". As writer Gary Younge has said, "Probably more than almost any other writer alive, Angelou's life literally is her work".
Source_ Wikipedia
If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude.

I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.

I've learned that you shouldn't go through life with a catcher's mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw something back.

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.

Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at it destination full of hope.

Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.

My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.

While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God's creation.


Watch - listen, really listen. This makes me cry.  So much there, so powerfully delivered.




Previous Salutes


 Brad Pitt  
Bishop Desmond Tutu             
Betty White       


1 comment:

Ur-spo said...

I liked the book quotation the best.