QuoteProject
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.
Maya Angelou
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

Maya Angelou highlights the painful journey of growing up as a Southern Black girl, emphasizing the added pain of feeling displaced in society.

In this quote, Maya Angelou reflects on the unique struggles faced by Southern Black girls as they navigate the challenges of growing up. The metaphor of 'rust on the razor' poignantly illustrates how their experience of displacement adds an extra layer of hurt, making an already difficult process even more painful. This quote powerfully conveys the unnecessary and additional suffering inflicted by societal inequalities and highlights the need for awareness and change.

Themes

GrowthPainDisplacementIdentitySociety

In practice

Example use cases

This quote can be used in a discussion about the challenges faced by young women of color in education forums.

More from Maya Angelou

If I am not good to myself, how can I expect anyone else to be good to me?
Maya AngelouRead
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 commensurate speed.
Maya AngelouRead
The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn't need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder-in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.
Maya AngelouRead
I dreamt we walked together along the shore. We made satisfying small talk and laughed. This morning I found sand in my shoe and a seashell in my pocket. Was I only dreaming?
Maya AngelouRead
I know that I'm not the easiest person to live with. The challenge I put on myself is so great that the person I live with feels himself challenged. I bring a lot to bear, and I don't know how not to.
Maya AngelouRead
I think Clinton, after getting into office and into Washington, was shocked at being bludgeoned. So he spent time trying to be all things to all people - one way guaranteed not to be successful or respected in a lion's den. You can't just play around with all those big cats - you've got to take somebody on.
Maya AngelouRead

Similar quotes

My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.
Vladimir NabokovRead
How then to enforce peace? Not by reason, certainly, nor by education. If a man could not look at the fact of peace and the fact of war and choose the former in preference to the latter, what additional argument could persuade him? What could be more eloquent as a condemnation of war than war itself? What tremendous feat of dialectic could carry with it a tenth the power of a single gutted ship with its ghastly cargo?
Isaac AsimovRead
Moreover, from the time when He said, 'Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven;' and again, 'He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it; ' no one becomes a member of Christ except it be either by baptism in Christ, or death for Christ.
Saint AugustineRead
There are three conditions which often look alike Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow: Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference, ... .
T. S. EliotRead
Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.
Ludwig WittgensteinRead
Someday no one will remember that she ever existed, I wrote in my notebook, and then, or that I did. Because memories fall apart, too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow. In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying again.
John GreenRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.