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If you don't understand yourself you don't understand anybody else.
Nikki Giovanni
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Nikki Giovanni
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: June 7
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Knoxville
Tennessee
Yolande Cornelia Giovanni
Jr
Else
Perseverance
Reality
Inspiring
Anybody
Understanding
Happiness
Success
Understand
Fear
More quotes by Nikki Giovanni
Libraries...house our dreams.
Nikki Giovanni
I prefer her [Nina Simone's] jazz period much more so than her folk period.
Nikki Giovanni
Poetry is the most mistaught subject in any school because we teach poetry by form and not by content.
Nikki Giovanni
A lot of people refuse to do things because they don't want to go naked... . We as black people, we as people, we as the human species have got to get used to the fact we're not going to be right most of the time, not even when our intentions are good. We've got to go naked and see what happens.
Nikki Giovanni
Follow your image as far as you can no matter how useless you think it is. Push yourself.
Nikki Giovanni
I appreciate and enjoy my age.
Nikki Giovanni
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.
Nikki Giovanni
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.
Nikki Giovanni
If now isn't a good time for the truth I don't see when we'll get to it.
Nikki Giovanni
I am so hip even my errors are correct
Nikki Giovanni
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.
Nikki Giovanni
I do not understand why any poet or writer would run for office that's a different sense of who you are. I'm just a poet. I am as truthful as I can be. That makes me an artist. I heed the people I do not lead the people.
Nikki Giovanni
I think that too many strangers were in her [Nina Simone's] life, and not enough people that she knew and loved.
Nikki Giovanni
Black love is Black wealth and they'll probably talk about my hard childhood and never understand that all the while I was quite happy
Nikki Giovanni
[To write poems] I think it's important to do research, and research mostly is going to come from books, so all of your reading is potentially helpful to your poetry.
Nikki Giovanni
It is not who you attend school with but who controls the school you attend.
Nikki Giovanni
You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts because if you write with someone looking over you shoulder, you'll never write.
Nikki Giovanni
We love because it's the only true adventure.
Nikki Giovanni
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.
Nikki Giovanni
If you were a pure bolt of fire-cutting the skies I'd touch you-risking my life-not because I'm brave or strong, but because I'm fascinated by what the outcome would be.
Nikki Giovanni
