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School should be eleven months of the year.

Nikki Giovanni

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Nikki Giovanni
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: June 7
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Knoxville
Tennessee
Yolande Cornelia Giovanni
Jr
Year
School
Years
Eleven
Months

More quotes by Nikki Giovanni

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We have a world to conquer...one person at a time...starting with ourselves.
Nikki Giovanni
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If now isn't a good time for the truth I don't see when we'll get to it.
Nikki Giovanni
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My dream is a red dress Above my knees High-heel red sandals And me coming over the top The music booming Hi Howie I will say With a lovely smile I don't want to play the game I want to be it.
Nikki Giovanni
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It's really just interesting to ask: why not? And see where that takes me.
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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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.
Nikki Giovanni
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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.
Nikki Giovanni
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I think speeches and fruit should always be fresh.
Nikki Giovanni
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Death is a slave's freedom.
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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If culture was a railroad, I can see the tracks running from the Spirituals to the Hip Hop Nation.
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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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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Follow your image as far as you can no matter how useless you think it is. Push yourself.
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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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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A lot of people refuse to do things because they don't want to go naked... . We as black people, we as people, we as the human species have got to get used to the fact we're not going to be right most of the time, not even when our intentions are good. We've got to go naked and see what happens.
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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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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We write because we believe the human spirit cannot be tamed and should not be trained.
Nikki Giovanni