Quote

Daddy says the world is a drum tight and hard and I told him I'm gonna beat out my own rhythm.

Nikki Giovanni

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Nikki Giovanni
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: June 7
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Knoxville
Tennessee
Yolande Cornelia Giovanni
Jr
Rhythm
Beat
Beats
Gonna
Told
Says
Drum
Hard
Tight
World
Daddy

More quotes by 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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You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts because if you write with someone looking over you shoulder, you'll never write.
Nikki Giovanni
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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.
Nikki Giovanni
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There are things you stand up for because it’s right.
Nikki Giovanni
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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.
Nikki Giovanni
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Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste.
Nikki Giovanni
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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
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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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I appreciate and enjoy my age.
Nikki Giovanni
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We must invest in tomorrow. And pay our teachers for teaching as we pay our coaches for coaching.
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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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
Nikki Giovanni
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If you don't understand yourself you don't understand anybody else.
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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Most of my books are a two-year project. I tend to follow my heart and my mind and research materials where they take me.
Nikki Giovanni
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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.
Nikki Giovanni
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I don't have a life-style, I have a life.
Nikki Giovanni
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I am proud of the hip hop generation. They are good business people and, actually, good people.
Nikki Giovanni
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You're only as good as your last book.
Nikki Giovanni
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I think that too many strangers were in her [Nina Simone's] life, and not enough people that she knew and loved.
Nikki Giovanni