Quote

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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Nikki Giovanni
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: June 7
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Knoxville
Tennessee
Yolande Cornelia Giovanni
Jr
Else
Poverty
States
Accepting
Anything
Struggle
Different
Middle
Mind
Class
Think
State
Radically
Thinking
Poor
Blacks
Black
Accept

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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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I’ve not learned the acceptable way of saying you fascinate me...I’ve not even learned how to say I like you without frightening people away-
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We love because it's the only true adventure.
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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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Now, everything I do, I do because I want to. And I believe the best is yet to come.
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Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste.
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You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts.
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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
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Rage is to writers what water is to fish.
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A white face goes with a white mind. Occasionally a black face goes with a white mind. Very seldom a white face will have a black mind.
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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.
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I am totally fascinated by people and our history as I understand and continue to explore it. People have so much to give and so far to go and yet we have given and gone a great distance. It's really just interesting to ask: why not? And see where that takes me.
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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 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.
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Don't want to be near you for the thoughts we share but the words we never have to speak.
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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.
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Young people coming up who are having difficulty with their so-called celebrity need to get back into their lives. It's your life and you can't let the fact that you do something pretty good take away the joy of it.
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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.
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We are better than we think and not yet what we want to be.
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We believe 'Peter Rabbit' because Beatrix Potter believes it. You have to.
Nikki Giovanni