I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings Quotes

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

Life is going to give you just what you put in it. Put your whole heart in everything you do, and pray, then you can wait.

Language is man’s way of communicating with his fellow man and it is language alone which separates him from the lower animals.

Anything that works against you can also work for you once you understand the Principle of Reverse.

As I ate she began the first of what we later called “my lessons in living.” She said that I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and even more intelligent than college professors. She encouraged me to listen carefully to what country people called mother wit. That in those homely sayings was couched the collective wisdom of generations.

Of all the needs (there are none imaginary) a lonely child has, the one that must be satisfied, if there is going to be hope and a hope of wholeness, is the unshaking need for an unshakable God. My pretty Black brother was my Kingdom Come.

Pursue the things you love doing, and then do them so well that people can’t take their eyes off you.

Ritie, don’t worry ‘cause you ain’t pretty. Plenty pretty women I seen digging ditches or worse. You smart. I swear to God, I rather you have a good mind than a cute behind.

If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. It is an unnecessary insult.

The caged bird sings with a fearful trill, of things unknown, but longed for still, and his tune is heard on the distant hill, for the caged bird sings of freedom.

The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination, as are intelligence and necessity when unblunted by formal education.

He was a simple man who had no inferiority complex about his lack of education, and even more amazing no superiority complex because he had succeeded despite that lack.

The city became for me the ideal of what I wanted to be as a grown-up. Friendly, but never gushing, cool but not frigid or distant, distinguished without the awful stiffness.

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing

Miss Kirwin was that rare educator who was in love with information. I will always believe that her love of teaching came not so much from her liking for students but from her desire to make sure that some of the things she knew would find repositories so that they could be shared again.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision

If you’re for the right thing, you do it without thinking.

Hoping for the best, prepared for the worst, and unsurprised by anything in between.

She comprehended the perversity of life, that in the struggle lies the joy

People whose history and future were threatened each day by extinction considered that it was only by divine intervention that they were able to live at all. I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God’s will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed

Can’t Do is like Don’t Care. Neither of them have a home.

I was basically good. Not understood, and not even liked, but even so, just, and better than just. I was merciful.

Although I had no regrets, I told myself sadly that growing up was not the painless process one would have thought it to be.

Childhood’s logic never asks to be proved (all conclusions are absolute)