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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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Nikki Giovanni
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: June 7
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Knoxville
Tennessee
Yolande Cornelia Giovanni
Jr
Brilliant
Thoughts
Looking
Write
Someone
Must
Shoulder
Writing
Never
Shoulders

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Who I am really keeps surprising me.
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We love because it's the only true adventure.
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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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We just didn't put any pressure on each other, and I think that everybody needs somebody, and I didn't do it to try to do it it's what we [with Nina Simone] were to each other.
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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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When younger, I thought one of the particulars of being Homo sapiens was to communicate. I have not learned not to, though I am cautious when I try.
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Being Black and poor is, I think, radically different from being anything else and poor. Poor, to most Blacks, is a state of mind. Those who accept it are poor those who struggle are middle class.
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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.
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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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There are things you stand up for because it’s right.
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The catchword I use with my classes is: The authority of the writer always overcomes the skepticism of the reader.
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It's really just interesting to ask: why not? And see where that takes me.
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My dream is a red dress Above my knees High-heel red sandals And me coming over the top The music booming Hi Howie I will say With a lovely smile I don't want to play the game I want to be it.
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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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I am proud of the hip hop generation. They are good business people and, actually, good people.
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Follow your image as far as you can no matter how useless you think it is. Push yourself.
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Daddy says the world is a drum tight and hard and I told him I'm gonna beat out my own rhythm.
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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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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