Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr. Quotes
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School should be eleven months of the year.
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I'm an old storyteller. I tell the story. It's about the story.
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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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go barefoot and be warm all the time not only when you go to bed and sleep
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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 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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We eat up artists like there's going to be a famine at the end.
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But nonviolence was never for the oppressor; it was for the oppressed.
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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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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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A lot is yet to be enjoyed. I'd like to stomp grapes for wine. Go to Antarctica. Have dinner with Venus Williams who is the greatest tennis player ever.
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The poet can only write the poems; it takes the reader to complete the meaning.
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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 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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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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Hip-hop is a cultural expression - it's embracing.
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VISIBILITY - You've got to find a way to make people know you're there
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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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Facts are only tools to gain control over yourself and other people.
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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 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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I spend a lot of time learning about bird watching.
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I am ever fascinated by the human experience and by, actually, human beings.