Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr. Quotes
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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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We must invest in tomorrow. And pay our teachers for teaching as we pay our coaches for coaching.
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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 don't have a life-style, I have a life.
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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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She knows who she is, because she knows who she isn't.
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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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Libraries...house our dreams.
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A white face goes with a white mind. Occasionally a black face goes with a white mind. Very seldom a white face will have a black mind.
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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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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'm an old storyteller. I tell the story. It's about the story.
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And like an unfaithful mate, once a car has let you down you never sort of trust it again.
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We are less lonely when we connect. Art is connection.
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In law school they teach you that everything is a contract; well, in poetry everything is a narrative.
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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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The poet can only write the poems; it takes the reader to complete the meaning.
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But nonviolence was never for the oppressor; it was for the oppressed.
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I’ve not learned the acceptable way of saying you fascinate me...I’ve not even learned how to say I like you without frightening people away-
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The only advice [for new writers and poets] I can offer is to be yourself: not the self someone else wants you to be, but the self you are. Enjoy yourself and your life. But most of all travel and eat. That's how we learn.
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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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You must invent your own games and teach us old ones how to play.
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It's not a ladder we're climbing, it's literature we're producing. . . . We cannot possibly leave it to history as a discipline nor to sociology nor science nor economics to tell the story of our people.
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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.