Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr. Quotes
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Schools should be integrated by race and by class.
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Just as nature abhors a vacuum, humans resist change. Change will occur; vacuums will be filled.
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Iife/personality must be taken as a total entity. All of your life is all of your life, and no one incident stands alone.
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We write because we believe the human spirit cannot be tamed and should not be trained.
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I appreciate and enjoy my age.
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Schools should serve breakfast, lunch and an afternoon snack. No sugared drinks, no fast type food.
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Who I really am keeps surprising me.
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Floating to shore...riding a low moon...on a slow cloud.
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Deal with yourself as a individual, worthy of respect and make everyone else deal with you the same way.
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If you don't understand yourself you don't understand anybody else.
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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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I am honest; I try to be truthful. I like people and wish us well. We are not always deserving of our own best wishes.
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Violence is like money in the bank; it's only helpful if you don't have to use it.
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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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i hope i die warmed by the life that i tried to live
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It is not who you attend school with but who controls the school you attend.
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Black love is Black wealth and they'll probably talk about my hard childhood and never understand that all the while I was quite happy
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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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I don't have a life-style, I have a life.
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Writing is a conversation with reading; a dialogue with thinking. All conversations with older people contain repetition. Some of the ideas mean a lot to me, just interesting, so I both embrace and attack the ideas because I found them, well, delightful.
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She knows who she is, because she knows who she isn't.
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I love you because no two snowflakes are alike, and it is possible, if you stand tippy-toe, to walk between the raindrops.
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you know a person is having a severe personality crisis if you see a high school class ring on a finger beyond the first semester in college. Male or female. It's a big sign saying nothing has mattered to my life since senior year.
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I just think she was a wonderful woman. What I think of when I think of Nina [Simone] is someone that I could relate to, who didn't want anything from me, that could relate to me because I didn't want anything from her. It was nice.