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Favorite poems are like favorite children. We definitely have them but we never tell as the others would have their feelings hurt.

Nikki Giovanni

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Nikki Giovanni
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: June 7
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Knoxville
Tennessee
Yolande Cornelia Giovanni
Jr
Like
Definitely
Hurt
Feelings
Tell
Others
Children
Never
Poems
Would
Favorite

More quotes by Nikki Giovanni

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We have a world to conquer...one person at a time...starting with ourselves.
Nikki Giovanni
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[My] Books are like puppies and children: you love each one for different reasons. I don't actually have a favorite because, if I were honest, I'm always more excited about what is coming.
Nikki Giovanni
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I wish that she had had a black loon because I don't think that Nina [Simone] did. I have always had - I've been very fortunate - a group of little old ladies that I love and who love me, and who turned and to whom I turn at different times.
Nikki Giovanni
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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.
Nikki Giovanni
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I used to go up to her house. She lived upstate [in New York] and I lived in Manhattan you're living in a lot of noise and my career was being built. For me to spend time with Nina [Simone] is to spend a lot of quiet time.
Nikki Giovanni
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A lot of people refuse to do things because they don't want to go naked, don't want to go without guarantee. But that's what's got to happen. You go naked until you die.
Nikki Giovanni
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I move on feeling and have learned to distrust those who don't.
Nikki Giovanni
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You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts.
Nikki Giovanni
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I have not tried to tell the people anything. I have shared my views with the people but I have not tried to lead or correct them, assuming they need correction.
Nikki Giovanni
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We are less lonely when we connect. Art is connection.
Nikki Giovanni
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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.
Nikki Giovanni
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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.
Nikki Giovanni
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It is not who you attend school with but who controls the school you attend.
Nikki Giovanni
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Facts are only tools to gain control over yourself and other people.
Nikki Giovanni
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go barefoot and be warm all the time not only when you go to bed and sleep
Nikki Giovanni
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The only way you can grow is to let yourself make mistakes and create contradictions. As we learn new things, some of our old attitudes will change.
Nikki Giovanni
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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.
Nikki Giovanni
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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.
Nikki Giovanni
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We are better than we think and not yet what we want to be.
Nikki Giovanni
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I prefer her [Nina Simone's] jazz period much more so than her folk period.
Nikki Giovanni