Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr. Quotes
-
And like an unfaithful mate, once a car has let you down you never sort of trust it again.
-
Schools should serve breakfast, lunch and an afternoon snack. No sugared drinks, no fast type food.
-
School should be eleven months of the year.
-
Sacred cows make very poor gladiators.
-
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.
-
You must invent your own games and teach us old ones how to play.
-
go barefoot and be warm all the time not only when you go to bed and sleep
-
In law school they teach you that everything is a contract; well, in poetry everything is a narrative.
-
If you don't understand yourself you don't understand anybody else.
-
Love is the offspring of spiritual affinity and unless that affinity is created in a moment, it will not be created for years or even generations.
-
The poet can only write the poems; it takes the reader to complete the meaning.
-
I don't have a life-style, I have a life.
-
We must invest in tomorrow. And pay our teachers for teaching as we pay our coaches for coaching.
-
Follow your image as far as you can no matter how useless you think it is. Push yourself.
-
If i can't have what i want . . . then my job is to want what i've got and be satisfied that at least there is something more to want
-
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.
-
I think one of the nicest things that we created as a generation was just the fact that we could say, 'Hey, I don't like white people.'
-
Facts are only tools to gain control over yourself and other people.
-
I'm an old storyteller. I tell the story. It's about the story.
-
The trip to Mars can only be understood through Black Americans. I say, the trip to Mars can only be understood through Black Americans.
-
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.
-
Fanatics are, for one thing, boring and, for another, unreliable. They tend to burn out just when you need them.
-
I was responding to one thing for the woman I knew, and there's another thing for what did she give, right. She [Nina Simone] was a great teacher.
-
I prefer her [Nina Simone's] jazz period much more so than her folk period.