I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings Quotes
"What you looking at me for? I didn’t come to stay …"
"I hadn’t so much forgot as I couldn’t bring myself to remember."
"Whether I could remember the rest of the poem or not was immaterial."
"The truth of the statement was like a wadded-up handkerchief, sopping wet in my fists."
"The children’s section of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church was wiggling and giggling over my well-known forgetfulness."
"As I’d watched Momma put ruffles on the hem and cute little tucks around the waist, I knew that once I put it on I’d look like a movie star."
"Just thinking about it made me go around with angel’s dust sprinkled over my face for days."
"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."
"I don’t remember much of the trip, but after we reached the segregated southern part of the journey, things must have looked up."
"Years later I discovered that the United States had been crossed thousands of times by frightened Black children traveling alone."
"The town reacted to us as its inhabitants had reacted to all things new before our coming."
"We lived with our grandmother and uncle in the rear of the Store."
"Her crisp meat pies and cool lemonade, when joined to her miraculous ability to be in two places at the same time, assured her business success."
"The lamplight in the Store gave a soft make-believe feeling to our world which made me want to whisper and walk about on tiptoe."
"In those tender mornings the Store was full of laughing, joking, boasting and bragging."
"The sounds of the new morning had been replaced with grumbles about cheating houses, weighted scales, snakes, skimpy cotton and dusty rows."
"The champion picker of the day before was the hero of the dawn."
"During these years in Stamps, I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare."
"Bailey and I decided to memorize a scene from The Merchant of Venice."
"Momma opened boxes of crispy crackers and we sat around the meat block at the rear of the Store."
"Throwing scoops of corn to the chickens and mixing sour dry mash with leftover food and oily dish water for the hogs were among our evening chores."
"We were also grateful that we had concluded the dirtiest of chores and had only gotten the evil-smelling swill on our shoes, stockings, feet and hands."
"Momma had married three times: Mr. Johnson, my grandfather, who left her around the turn of the century."
"A light shade had been pulled down between the Black community and all things white, but one could see through it enough to develop a fear-admiration-contempt for the white "things"."
""Thou shall not be dirty" and "Thou shall not be impudent" were the two commandments of Grandmother Henderson upon which hung our total salvation."
"Charity don’t want nothing for itself. It don’t want to be bossman. It don’t want to be headman."
"I knew from listening to a thousand preachers that she was nearing the end of her reading, and I hadn’t really heard, heard to understand, a single word."
"The action was so graceful and inclusively benign."
"The only thing I could do was to stop talking to people other than Bailey."
"I wondered if the Holy Rollers were going to heaven after all their shouting."
"The Black woman in the South who raises sons, grandsons and nephews had her heartstrings tied to a hanging noose."
"I didn’t question why Mrs. Flowers had singled me out for attention."
"I cared less about the trip than about the fact that Bailey was unhappy."
"It was better to be meek and lowly, spat upon and abused for this little time than to spend eternity frying in the fires of hell."
"But Negro girls in small Southern towns... were given as extensive and irrelevant preparations for adulthood as rich white girls shown in magazines."
"Reality began its tedious crawl back into their reasoning."
"After all, they were needy and hungry and despised and dispossessed, and sinners the world over were in the driver’s seat."
"A stranger to the music could not have made a distinction between the songs sung a few minutes before and those being danced to in the gay house by the railroad tracks."
"The apprehensive mood was shot through with shafts of gaiety, as a black sky is streaked with lightning."
"As I pushed my way into the Store I wondered if the announcer gave any thought to the fact that he was addressing as 'ladies and gentlemen' all the Negroes around the world who sat sweating and praying, glued to their 'master’s voice.'"
"It would take an hour or more before the people would leave the Store and head for home."
"A pyramid of flesh with the whitefolks on the bottom, as the broad base."
"We were maids and farmers, handymen and washerwomen, and anything higher that we aspired to was farcical and presumptuous."
"I was no longer simply a member of the proud graduating class of 1940; I was a proud member of the wonderful, beautiful Negro race."
"Knowing Momma, I knew that I never knew Momma."
"When things were very bad his soul just crawled behind his heart and curled up and went to sleep."
"The Lord protect the Hebrew children in the fiery furnace and didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel? We only had to wait on the Lord."
"They don’t really hate us. They don’t know us. How can they hate us? They mostly scared."
"The humorless puzzle of inequality and hate."
"The agony of wonder made the fuzzy seats hard, soured the boiled eggs."
"The big car was obedient under her one-hand driving."
"The needs of a society determine its ethics."
"The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination."
"In the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who is offered only the crumbs from his country’s table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast."
"At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice."
"I was forgotten on the sidelines, a little like Switzerland in World War II."
"The confrontation, which brought relief, had come on an ordinary unheralded evening."
"A party was shimmering below and Bailey had defied Mother’s eleven o’clock curfew."
"Twelve o’clock came and went at once, and I sat up in bed and laid my cards out for the first of many games of solitaire."
"When rain comes finally, washing away a low sky of muddy ocher, we who could not control the phenomenon are pressed into relief."
"Bailey was leaving home. At one o’clock in the morning, my little brother... was leaving home."
"She wants me out, does she? Well, I’ll leave the air on fire."
"I leaned on the doorjamb, lending him my physical presence but said no more."
"Maya, if you want to leave now, come on. I’ll take care of you."
"The Black man hasn’t even begun to storm the battlefronts. I’m going for broke myself."
"I’m your sister, and whatever I can do, I’ll do it."
"Don’t worry about me. That’s all I want you to do. Don’t worry."
"The house was smudged with unspoken thoughts and it was necessary to go to my room to breathe."
"The world was moving so fast, so much money was being made, so many people were dying in Guam, and Germany, that hordes of strangers became good friends overnight."
"I credit my new reactions to the fact that during what surely must have been a critical period I was not dragged down by hopelessness."
"Life had a conveyor-belt quality. It went on unpursued and unpursuing, and my only thought was to remain erect, and keep my secret along with my balance."