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Who I am really keeps surprising me.

Nikki Giovanni

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Nikki Giovanni
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: June 7
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Knoxville
Tennessee
Yolande Cornelia Giovanni
Jr
Surprising
Keeps
Really

More quotes by 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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Libraries...house our dreams.
Nikki Giovanni
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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.
Nikki Giovanni
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You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts.
Nikki Giovanni
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School should be eleven months of the year.
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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Black love is black wealth
Nikki Giovanni
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Photographers direct the eye toward a particular object. We who write, one hopes, are directing the heart and the soul.
Nikki Giovanni
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Follow your image as far as you can no matter how useless you think it is. Push yourself.
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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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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We black women are the single group in the West intact. And anybody can see we're pretty shaky. We are, however (all praises), the only group that derives its identity from itself.
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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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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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.
Nikki Giovanni
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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.
Nikki Giovanni
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You're only as good as your last book.
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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A lot is yet to be enjoyed. I'd like to stomp grapes for wine. Go to Antarctica. Have dinner with Venus Williams who is the greatest tennis player ever.
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