Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr. Quotes
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For most of my life, I've thought of myself as pretty cool.
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The trip to Mars can only be understood through Black Americans. I say, the trip to Mars can only be understood through Black Americans.
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I'm an old storyteller. I tell the story. It's about the story.
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Fanatics are, for one thing, boring and, for another, unreliable. They tend to burn out just when you need them.
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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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I am totally fascinated by people and our history as I understand and continue to explore it. People have so much to give and so far to go and yet we have given and gone a great distance. It's really just interesting to ask: why not? And see where that takes me.
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I knew Stokely [Carmichael] and them, but when you got to that, you saw that Nina Simone started to take up their burden. She started to preach for them. She was taking on the burden of "I want to tell the people."
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But nonviolence was never for the oppressor; it was for the oppressed.
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I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.
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Poetry is like air. It's one of the necessary things. Everyone benefits from poetry. And as you know, poetry is international. There are only two things that are truly international, poetry and wine.
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I hope that, reading 'Rosa,' people will remember their own family and friends and talk about what they did and did not do.
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Don't want to be near you for the thoughts we share but the words we never have to speak.
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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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One stands, in fact, in awe of the Constitution of the United States, though it is an idea and not quite a reality.
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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.
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Young people coming up who are having difficulty with their so-called celebrity need to get back into their lives. It's your life and you can't let the fact that you do something pretty good take away the joy of it.
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Hip-hop is a cultural expression - it's embracing.
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Libraries...house our dreams.
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I would put books on par with chocolate, because a good book is delicious.
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We just didn't put any pressure on each other, and I think that everybody needs somebody, and I didn't do it to try to do it; it's what we [with Nina Simone] were to each other.
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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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There're two people in the world that are not likeable: a master and a slave.
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Poetry is the most informative of all of the arts because everything comes down to poetry. No matter what it is we are describing, ultimately we use either a metaphor; or we say "that's poetry in motion." You drink a glass of wine and say, "that's poetry in a bottle." Everything is poetry, so I think we come down to emotional information. And that's what poetry conveys.
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I think it's the strength of her music, using art to make a statement. I think it really is. It was not a cheap gift. The gift was an expensive gift for Nina [Simone]. Diamonds are expensive. Her music was expensive. She paid for it, but I think it's her greatest gift.