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We are less lonely when we connect. Art is connection.

Nikki Giovanni

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Nikki Giovanni
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: June 7
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Knoxville
Tennessee
Yolande Cornelia Giovanni
Jr
Less
Art
Connect
Connection
Connections
Lonely

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, 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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Love is the offspring of spiritual affinity and unless that affinity is created in a moment, it will not be created for years or even generations.
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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If you don't understand yourself you don't understand anybody else.
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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God knows it's a sign of a really sick mind to see grown people, adults with responsibilities, wearing class rings.
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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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 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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Who I am really keeps surprising me.
Nikki Giovanni
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When younger, I thought one of the particulars of being Homo sapiens was to communicate. I have not learned not to, though I am cautious when I try.
Nikki Giovanni
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I am so hip even my errors are correct
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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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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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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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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I prefer her [Nina Simone's] jazz period much more so than her folk period.
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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Black Americans should be given credit for finding probably the perfect weapon the weapon of the song. And that song continues. Most holocausts don't, so they have this bitterness left over. The phenomenon of the world, as far as Black Americans are considered, is that we are not a bitter people.
Nikki Giovanni
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I do not understand why any poet or writer would run for office that's a different sense of who you are. I'm just a poet. I am as truthful as I can be. That makes me an artist. I heed the people I do not lead the people.
Nikki Giovanni