Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr. Quotes
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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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I appreciate my my sleep In sleep my conversation is witty My home is dusted My office work is up to date The dog is even well behaved And food is on the table on time But then when I'm asleep I don't have you to clutter and confuse My hungry heart
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I am a huge fan of the Black woman. I never hesitate to recommend her when times are bad or things go wrong.
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There are things you stand up for because it’s right.
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[To become a poet] The most important thing is to pay attention. The next would probably be to read; it's so important to pay attention. It keeps you from being bored, and I might add it keeps you from being boorish.
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The more you love someone the more he wants from you and the less you have to give since you've already given him your love.
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White people really deal more with God and black people with Jesus.
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Everybody that loves freedom loves Harriet Tubman because she was determined not only to be free, but to make free as many people as she could.
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If culture was a railroad, I can see the tracks running from the Spirituals to the Hip Hop Nation.
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Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to the error that counts.
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Black Americans should be given credit for finding probably the perfect weapon; the weapon of the song. And that song continues. Most holocausts don't, so they have this bitterness left over. The phenomenon of the world, as far as Black Americans are considered, is that we are not a bitter people.
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We [Black people] have always used our creativity to battle and we're not the only ones. Black Americans are certainly leaders in that simply because we were denied education and dealt with enforced illiteracy. But people seem to always forget that literacy is not the only way of learning things or conveying knowledge.
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Baseball is already the world's most tranquil sport. It is probably the only active sport where you are not seriously required to be alive to play.
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and sometimes I sit down at my typewriter and I think not of someone cause there isn't anyone to think about and i wonder is it worth it
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My work is a part of me and I know it. I have no reason to try to pick one part of me out from the rest. I only see my work, or rather I should say I see my work only telling my part of the human experience.
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BEFORE YOU JUMP OFF A BRIDGE OR HANG YOURSELF OR BE UNHAPPY PLEASE CONSIDER: LIVE FOR YOURSELF; THOSE WHO HATE YOU HAVE NO PURCHASE
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No one needs to teach you to be mean; we need to be taught to be kind.
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The job of the architect becomes more difficult in this secular age. Where once he had a god to extol, he now has humans like himself; where once he had "he," he now has "she" and "they.
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If now isn't a good time for the truth I don't see when we'll get to it.
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Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste.
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Poetry is the most mistaught subject in any school because we teach poetry by form and not by content.
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If I could come back as anything - I'd be a bird, first, but definitely the command key is my second choice.
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We are better than we think and not yet what we want to be.
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Life is a process where people mix and match, fall apart and come back together.