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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
Keeps
Really
Surprising

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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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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You're only as good as your last book.
Nikki Giovanni
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Language instruction should start in the first grade. Writing, also.
Nikki Giovanni
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Facts are only tools to gain control over yourself and other 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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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.
Nikki Giovanni
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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.
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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Fanatics are, for one thing, boring and, for another, unreliable. They tend to burn out just when you need them.
Nikki Giovanni
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White people really deal more with God and black people with Jesus.
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
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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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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 write because we believe the human spirit cannot be tamed and should not be trained.
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