Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr. Quotes
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I appreciate and enjoy my age.
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Schools should be integrated by race and by class.
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Who I really am keeps surprising me.
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God knows it's a sign of a really sick mind to see grown people, adults with responsibilities, wearing class rings.
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Just as nature abhors a vacuum, humans resist change. Change will occur; vacuums will be filled.
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I am so hip even my errors are correct
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I am proud of the hip hop generation. They are good business people and, actually, good people. It's strange that the only time the major press talks about them is when someone gets killed or does drugs or something; yet these are the same press people who made heroes out of the Mafia and other crooks, you know.
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Floating to shore...riding a low moon...on a slow cloud.
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I am of the generation of segregation. Black Lives Matter is post. I said today, and I will say all the time, "If Nina [Simone] were here, she'd have her Black Lives Matter [T-shirt] on." I think they're great kids. They don't need me or anybody else to tell them what to do.
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If you don't understand yourself you don't understand anybody else.
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Nothing improves your writing, I think, as much as your keeping writing.
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Mistakes are a fact of life. If you are willing to be wrong then you have earned the right to be right.
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Storytelling is how history is passed. It's what our ancestors did, it's what everybody's done. It has to come back into a story because otherwise, it's stuck in this book and it's boring and it's academic and I'm not against intelligence and I'm not against education, I don't want to be misunderstood, but we have tell the stories to our young people a little bit early and history gives us a lot of things.
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It is not who you attend school with but who controls the school you attend.
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You do what you can with what you have. You have to work the edges whatever they are. The main thing is keeping your integrity.
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i hope i die warmed by the life that i tried to live
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Sacred cows make very poor gladiators.
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We write because we believe the human spirit cannot be tamed and should not be trained.
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go barefoot and be warm all the time not only when you go to bed and sleep
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She knows who she is, because she knows who she isn't.
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You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts because if you write with someone looking over you shoulder, you'll never write.
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I used to dream militant dreams of taking over america to show these whitefolks how it should be done i used to dream radical dreams of blowing everyone away with my perceptive powers of correct analysis i even used to think that i'd be the one to stop the riot and negotiate the peace then i awoke & dug that if i dreamed natural dreams of being a natural woman doing what a woman does when she's natural i would have a revolution.
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I think that too many strangers were in her [Nina Simone's] life, and not enough people that she knew and loved.
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And like an unfaithful mate, once a car has let you down you never sort of trust it again.