Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr. (Nikki Giovanni) Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric: parallelism, antithesis, epistrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, periphrasis, litotes - the whole bag of tricks.
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It is still fashionable to believe that how you organize yourself religiously in this life may matter for eternity. Unless we can erode the prestige of that kind of thinking, we're not going to be able to undermine these divisions in our world.
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One can not impede scientific progress.
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Children like being a little scared, but they don't want to be disturbed.
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Well yes so far, I was recently in Germany and they had me do six book signings a day and that was too much so I had them cut it down to about three. It becomes taxing at times but its a lot of fun and you meet a lot of nice people.
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I love any excuse to come to New York - when it's not February.
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One of my early childhood memories was my grandmother always having a bowl of Nestle chocolate bars at her house. My sister and I would argue over who could eat the chocolate bars. Looking back, I don't know why we just didn't share. We could have split them.
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When my dad, Tommy Tucker Kelly, was about six, he started out with his dad on 'The Black and White Minstrel' Shows.
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I'm lucky to have a wife and a child that keep me grounded.
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Peter Cook and Dudley Moore were friends and the last people I expected would predecease me. They were, in a sense, casualties of fame.
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My parents don't have any showbusiness links. They are so far away from it.
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I always liked red. It's a picker-upper.
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I like how the other guys are stepping up. If we keep this up, then Bell does not have to score 25 points a game for us to win.
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There's Catholic guilt about things, then there's the guilt of being the youngest of 10, so when nice things happen to you, you're not really allowed to enjoy them.
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Of all the things that are beyond my power, I value nothing more highly than to be allowed the honor of entering into bonds of friendship with people who sincerely love truth. For, of things beyond our power, I believe there is nothing in the world which we can love with tranquility except such men.
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veritas norma sui et falsi est
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All the rest of the world uses the word 'electricity.' They've borrowed the word from English. But we Chinese have our own word for it!
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There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them, or above each other-by language, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought.
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All this takes many clumsy and inexact word-descriptions to describe, but if we read paintings like we read books, it would not be such a hidden language for painting can effortlessly produce such elegant solutions.
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If an umpire misses a called third strike and the other side ends up scoring because of it, I'm not going to forget it. If there are runners on second and third and two out, and if the umpire has just given the hitter an extra strike and the next pitch goes into the hole and both runs score, I've got to say something to the guy.
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We always want to see people strive and see the human spirit triumph against adversity. That's what it's all about because that's what we're doing. We're trying to triumph in our lives.
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There are a lot of chapters to the banjo's history. Part of it are the roots in Africa, where it's a more primitive instrument. Then it comes to the United States where it morphs into the slave music that they created here, which was very African in origin.
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Death is a slave's freedom.