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We are better than we think and not yet what we want to be.

Nikki Giovanni

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Nikki Giovanni
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: June 7
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Knoxville
Tennessee
Yolande Cornelia Giovanni
Jr
Better
Think
Thinking

More quotes by 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 think speeches and fruit should always be fresh.
Nikki Giovanni
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Iife/personality must be taken as a total entity. All of your life is all of your life, and no one incident stands alone.
Nikki Giovanni
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I used to go up to her house. She lived upstate [in New York] and I lived in Manhattan you're living in a lot of noise and my career was being built. For me to spend time with Nina [Simone] is to spend a lot of quiet time.
Nikki Giovanni
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We all have our muses. My grandmother and my mother are the people I write for. I'll never have to worry about who buys my work, or who likes it, and who doesn't. The people who I want to be proud of me already are.
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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Floating to shore...riding a low moon...on a slow cloud.
Nikki Giovanni
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Rage is to writers what water is to fish.
Nikki Giovanni
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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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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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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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Black love is Black wealth and they'll probably talk about my hard childhood and never understand that all the while I was quite happy
Nikki Giovanni
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Don't want to be near you for the thoughts we share but the words we never have to speak.
Nikki Giovanni
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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.
Nikki Giovanni
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Libraries...house our dreams.
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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Art offers sanctuary to everyone willing to open their Hearts as well as their Eyes.
Nikki Giovanni
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We [Black people] have always used our creativity to battle and we're not the only ones. Black Americans are certainly leaders in that simply because we were denied education and dealt with enforced illiteracy. But people seem to always forget that literacy is not the only way of learning things or conveying knowledge.
Nikki Giovanni
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I move on feeling and have learned to distrust those who don't.
Nikki Giovanni
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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.
Nikki Giovanni