The earth shuddered as trains thundered up and down in its black belly.

We may act sophisticated and worldly but I believe we feel safest when we go inside ourselves and find home, a place where we belong and maybe the only place we really do. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are still innocent and shy as magnolias. We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. We find parking spaces and honor our credit cards. I am convinced that most people do not grow up. Since the child cannot control that environment, she has to find her own place, a region where only she lives and no one else can enter. New York, with the elevators and subway rumble and millions of people, and Southeast Florida with its palm trees and sun and beaches are to the children of those regions, the ways the outer world are, has been, and will always be. If one grows up in the Southwest, the desert and open skies are natural. Here is my offering to you.'-from Letter to My DaughterFrom the Hardcover edition.Geography, as such, has little meaning to the child observer. You are fat and thin and pretty and plain, gay and straight, educated and unlettered, and I am speaking to you all. You are Black and White, Jewish and Muslim, Asian, Spanish speaking, Native Americans and Aleut. Like the rest of her remarkable work, Letter to My Daughter entertains and teaches it is a book to cherish, savor, re-read, and share.'I gave birth to one child, a son, but I have thousands of daughters. Told in her own inimitable style, this book transcends genres and categories: guidebook, memoir, poetry, and pure delight.Here in short spellbinding essays are glimpses of the tumultuous life that led Angelou to an exalted place in American letters and taught her lessons in compassion and fortitude: how she was brought up by her indomitable grandmother in segregated Arkansas, taken in at thirteen by her more worldly and less religious mother, and grew to be an awkward, six-foot-tall teenager whose first experience of loveless sex paradoxically left her with her greatest gift, a son.Whether she is recalling such lost friends as Coretta Scott King and Ossie Davis, extolling honesty, decrying vulgarity, explaining why becoming a Christian is a 'lifelong endeavor,' or simply singing the praises of a meal of red rice-Maya Angelou writes from the heart to millions of women she considers her extended family.

For a world of devoted readers, a much-awaited new volume of absorbing stories and inspirational wisdom from one of our best-loved writers.Dedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to My Daughter reveals Maya Angelou's path to living well and living a life with meaning.

Letter to My Daughter by Maya Angelou