Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr. Quotes
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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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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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School should be eleven months of the year.
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We must invest in tomorrow. And pay our teachers for teaching as we pay our coaches for coaching.
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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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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 don't have a life-style, I have a life.
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If you don't understand yourself you don't understand anybody else.
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You must invent your own games and teach us old ones how to play.
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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.
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We are less lonely when we connect. Art is connection.
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Nothing improves your writing, I think, as much as your keeping writing.
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When younger, I thought one of the particulars of being "Homo sapiens" was to communicate. I have not learned not to, though I am cautious when I try.
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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.'
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Sacred cows make very poor gladiators.
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The poet can only write the poems; it takes the reader to complete the meaning.
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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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Follow your image as far as you can no matter how useless you think it is. Push yourself.
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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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I prefer her [Nina Simone's] jazz period much more so than her folk period.
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For most of my life, I've thought of myself as pretty cool.
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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
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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.
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Facts are only tools to gain control over yourself and other people.