“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.”
Legendary author Dr. Maya Angelou has died. She was 86.
Here is a February 2013 Q & A with Dr. Angelou: “Maya Angelou discusses her faith, politics, courage ahead of LSU event next week” in The Times-Picayune. An excerpt:
Q: Would you say (spiritualism) is something that has inspired you over the years?
MA: Yes, and I’m happy to say, I’m pleased and delighted to say yes. It’s a wonderful thing to know that there is something to know there is something greater than I am, and that is God itself.
Q: So how has what has inspired you changed over the course of your career?
MA: Well, I believed that there was a God because I was told it by my grandmother and later by other adults. But when I found that I knew not only that there was God but that I was a child of God, when I understood that, when I comprehended that, more than that, when I internalized that, ingested that, I became courageous.
I dared to do anything that was a good thing. I dared to do things as distant from what seemed to be in my future. I became a translator in Serbo-Croat in Yugoslavia, and I conducted the Boston Pops. I taught at the Habima Theatre in Tel Aviv in Israel, and I worked as a journalist in Egypt with the only English news magazine in the Middle East. All of that, and I come from a little village in Arkansas, smaller than Picayune, (laughs) and I was a young black woman, trying to do all the good things.
When I was asked to do something good, I often say yes, I’ll try, yes, I’ll do my best. And part of that is believing, if God loves me, if God made everything from leaves to seals and oak trees, then what is it I can’t do?