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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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Nikki Giovanni
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: June 7
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Knoxville
Tennessee
Yolande Cornelia Giovanni
Jr
Periods
Much
Nina
Folk
Prefer
Period
Folks
Jazz

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I am ever fascinated by the human experience and by, actually, human beings.
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Everyone understands that love comes in many different packages and is used in many different ways. You cannot love beyond your years, nor can you fail to love beneath them... In other words, I think you get the love you need when you open your heart.
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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.
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If you don't understand yourself you don't understand anybody else.
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We black women are the single group in the West intact. And anybody can see we're pretty shaky. We are, however (all praises), the only group that derives its identity from itself.
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If culture was a railroad, I can see the tracks running from the Spirituals to the Hip Hop Nation.
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If you were a pure bolt of fire-cutting the skies I'd touch you-risking my life-not because I'm brave or strong, but because I'm fascinated by what the outcome would be.
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I am proud of the hip hop generation. They are good business people and, actually, good people. It's strange that the only time the major press talks about them is when someone gets killed or does drugs or something yet these are the same press people who made heroes out of the Mafia and other crooks, you know.
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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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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.
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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.
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Who I am really keeps surprising me.
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Art offers sanctuary to everyone willing to open their Hearts as well as their Eyes.
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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.
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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
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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.
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Poetry is the most mistaught subject in any school because we teach poetry by form and not by content.
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I am of the generation of segregation. Black Lives Matter is post. I said today, and I will say all the time, If Nina [Simone] were here, she'd have her Black Lives Matter [T-shirt] on. I think they're great kids. They don't need me or anybody else to tell them what to do.
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You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts because if you write with someone looking over you shoulder, you'll never write.
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We must invest in tomorrow. And pay our teachers for teaching as we pay our coaches for coaching.
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