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Poetry is the most mistaught subject in any school because we teach poetry by form and not by content.

Nikki Giovanni

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Nikki Giovanni
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: June 7
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Knoxville
Tennessee
Yolande Cornelia Giovanni
Jr
Education
Teach
Form
School
Content
Subject
Subjects
Poetry

More quotes by 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.
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It's really just interesting to ask: why not? And see where that takes me.
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My work is a part of me and I know it. I have no reason to try to pick one part of me out from the rest. I only see my work, or rather I should say I see my work only telling my part of the human experience.
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There are things you stand up for because it’s right.
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Sacred cows make very poor gladiators.
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Schools should serve breakfast, lunch and an afternoon snack. No sugared drinks, no fast type food.
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I always loved English because whatever human beings are, we are storytellers. It is our stories that give a light to the future. When I went to college I became a history major because history is such a wonderful story of who we think we are. English is much more a story of who we really are.
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Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste.
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.
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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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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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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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Nina Simone's music is incredibly honest. That's like saying, Why does Jesus' word still stay around? It's incredibly honest and it's good.
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.
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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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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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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.
Nikki Giovanni
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Rage is to writers what water is to fish.
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