“It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment.”

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/sophies-choice-1982 of Sophie's Choice (1 January 1982)
Reviews, Four star reviews
Context: Sometimes when you've read the novel, it gets in the way of the images on the screen. You keep remembering how you imagined things. That didn't happen with me during Sophie's Choice, because the movie is so perfectly cast and well-imagined that it just takes over and happens to you. It's quite an experience. … The movie becomes an act of discovery, as the naive young American, his mind filled with notions of love, death, and honor, becomes the friend of a woman who has seen so much hate, death, and dishonor that the only way she can continue is by blotting out the past, and drinking and loving her way into temporary oblivion. … Sophie's Choice is a fine, absorbing, wonderfully acted, heartbreaking movie. It is about three people who are faced with a series of choices, some frivolous, some tragic. As they flounder in the bewilderment of being human in an age of madness, they become our friends, and we love them.

Shared on her Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/MayaAngelou/posts/10150251846629796, July 4, 2011

Source: Mastery

"The Obscurity of the Poet", p. 16
Poetry and the Age (1953)

And what perplexes him is less the common, mean element in decent people than the goodness and kindness of wicked, vicious ones.
Broken Lights Diaries 1955-57.

Introduction : Woman as Other http://books.google.com/books?id=kUW0AAAAIAAJ&q=%22It+is+doubtless+impossible+to+approach+any+human+problems+with+a+mind+free+from+bias%22&pg=PA20#v=onepage
The Second Sex (1949)