Nikki Giovanni Quotations

For most of my life, I've thought of myself as pretty cool.

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.

Everything will change. The only question is growing up or decaying.

Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste.

A lot of people resist transition and therefore never allow themselves to enjoy who they are. Embrace the change, no matter what it is; once you do, you can learn about the new world you're in and take advantage of it.

We love because it's the only true adventure.

Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to the error that counts.

Poetry and music are very good friends. Like mommies and daddies and strawberries and cream - they go together.

Some say we are responsible for those we love. Others know we are responsible for those who love us.

We write because we believe the human spirit cannot be tamed and should not be trained.

Now, everything I do, I do because I want to. And I believe the best is yet to come.

I had a really nice childhood; I had great parents. I earned my allowance by washing dishes, and in the summer I earned my allowance by working in daddy's garden.

If you don't understand yourself you don't understand anybody else.

Follow your image as far as you can no matter how useless you think it is. Push yourself.

I really don't think life is about the I-could-have-beens. Life is only about the I-tried-to-do. I don't mind the failure but I can't imagine that I'd forgive myself if I didn't try.

I spend a lot of time learning about bird watching.

When you are skinning your customers, you should leave some skin on to grow again so that you can skin them again.

The poet Melvin B. Tolson once said, 'A civilization is judged only in its decline.' That made sense to me. I would imagine the same is true for poets and tennis players.

White people really deal more with God and black people with Jesus.

If now isn't a good time for the truth I don't see when we'll get to it.

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.

There're two people in the world that are not likeable: a master and a slave.

There are things you stand up for because it’s right.

We believe 'Peter Rabbit' because Beatrix Potter believes it. You have to.

The catchword I use with my classes is: The authority of the writer always overcomes the skepticism of the reader.

If everybody became a poet the world would be much better. We would all read to each other.

Hip-hop is a cultural expression - it's embracing.

Favorite poems are like favorite children. We definitely have them but we never tell as the others would have their feelings hurt.

I think one of the nicest things that we created as a generation was just the fact that we could say, 'Hey, I don't like white people.'

We eat up artists like there's going to be a famine at the end.

If I could come back as anything - I'd be a bird, first, but definitely the command key is my second choice.

You must invent your own games and teach us old ones how to play.

If you know what you're talking about, or if you feel that you do, the reader will believe you.

I am proud of the hip hop generation. They are good business people and, actually, good people.

She sounds extremely creative, in that she turned historical figures into mythical figures. Obviously, she's absorbing images and metaphors, and shows she's thinking. What more do we want a seven-year-old to do?

She doesn't have a lot of attitude. She was going about her business, and she was within her rights to be where she was. She wasn't trying to lead. She simply said, 'Enough. Here I stand.' I think people need to know that.

Kevin Powell is pushing to bring, as he has so brilliantly done before, the voices of his generation: the concerns, the cares, the fears and the fearlessness.

I resent people who say writers write from experience. Writers don't write from experience, though many are hesitant to admit that they don't. I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.

don't want to be near you for the thoughts we share but the words we never have to speak.

it's a sex object if you're pretty and no love or love and no sex if you're fat

His headstone said "Free at last, Free at last" - But death is a slave's freedom - We seek the freedom of free men - And the construction of a world - Where Martin Luther King could have lived - and preached non-violence

If I could come back as anything - I'd be a bird, first, but definitely the command key is my second choice

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.

I'm a big fan of history - applying the lessons as well as the joys and sadness. If we pay attention, we would see how we affect each other. In terms of time, we are not that far from one another. If we were to look back a century, it would seem like a long time; but, if we look at it by decades then it's only 10 years, and by generations it's only five.

Young people coming up who are having difficulty with their so-called celebrity need to get back into their lives. It's your life and you can't let the fact that you do something pretty good take away the joy of it.

Poetry is like air. It's one of the necessary things. Everyone benefits from poetry. And as you know, poetry is international. There are only two things that are truly international, poetry and wine.

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.

History is wonderful. We have so much we can learn if we would quit making ideology out of history, and just deal with what happened.

Poems don't have to rhyme. Poems are about beauty and emotion; in other words poems are about feelings.

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.

Poetry is music though, unfortunately, not all music is poetry. Because music has other carriers to take its message - beats, lyrics, singers, bass players - anyone in music can rise to make a major statement but in poetry there are only words to do the work. And they do sometimes have to sweat.

To write poems, I think it's important to do research, and research mostly is going to come from books, so all of your reading is potentially helpful to your poetry.

I am a big fan of the electronic book. I hate to see the old bookstores close, but they have to reinvent themselves. I believe the First Edition bookstore will be the next thing. People will read electronically, then decide they want to own that book. The author will then be invited to the old bookstores to sign. I think books will always be with us, but they will fill a different need.

The only advice [for new writers and poets] I can offer is to be yourself: not the self someone else wants you to be, but the self you are. Enjoy yourself and your life. But most of all travel and eat. That's how we learn.

Poetry is the most informative of all of the arts because everything comes down to poetry. No matter what it is we are describing, ultimately we use either a metaphor; or we say "that's poetry in motion." You drink a glass of wine and say, "that's poetry in a bottle." Everything is poetry, so I think we come down to emotional information. And that's what poetry conveys.

I am honest; I try to be truthful. I like people and wish us well. We are not always deserving of our own best wishes.

Photographers direct the eye toward a particular object. We who write, one hopes, are directing the heart and the soul.

Storytelling is how history is passed. It's what our ancestors did, it's what everybody's done. It has to come back into a story because otherwise, it's stuck in this book and it's boring and it's academic and I'm not against intelligence and I'm not against education, I don't want to be misunderstood, but we have tell the stories to our young people a little bit early and history gives us a lot of things.

If you're creating a slave situation, you would almost never bring women. And if we look at Slavery for example, we look at the Greeks and the Romans, right? It was always men. They never brought any women. Because women carry the seeds of the revolution, right? And if you have the men by themselves, then you can do what the French did with the Blackfeet, which is breed them out.

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.

To become a poet, the most important thing is to pay attention. The next would probably be to read; it's so important to pay attention. It keeps you from being bored, and I might add it keeps you from being boorish.

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."

I think that too many strangers were in Nina Simone life, and not enough people that she knew and loved.

I prefer her [Nina Simone] jazz period much more so than her folk period.

We just didn't put any pressure on each other, and I think that everybody needs somebody, and I didn't do it to try to do it; it's what we [with Nina Simone] were to each other.

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.

I like what they're doing. I think they're doing a good job, and I know that a lot of people are upset by them. These are great young men and women, and they're bold, and they are saying to America, "Something's going to change." I'm very proud of them.

I think it's the strength of her music, using art to make a statement. I think it really is. It was not a cheap gift. The gift was an expensive gift for Nina [Simone]. Diamonds are expensive. Her music was expensive. She paid for it, but I think it's her greatest gift.

I just think she was a wonderful woman. What I think of when I think of Nina [Simone] is someone that I could relate to, who didn't want anything from me, that could relate to me because I didn't want anything from her. It was nice.

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.

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.

Rage is to writers what water is to fish.

I appreciate my my sleep In sleep my conversation is witty My home is dusted My office work is up to date The dog is even well behaved And food is on the table on time But then when I'm asleep I don't have you to clutter and confuse My hungry heart

I think speeches and fruit should always be fresh.

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.

I move on feeling and have learned to distrust those who don't.

Death is a slave's freedom.

You're only as good as your last book.

Writers ... I think ... live on that fine line between insanity and genius ...

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.

Baseball is already the world's most tranquil sport. It is probably the only active sport where you are not seriously required to be alive to play.

And like an unfaithful mate, once a car has let you down you never sort of trust it again.

God knows it's a sign of a really sick mind to see grown people, adults with responsibilities, wearing class rings.

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

The ability to take pride in your own work is one of the hallmarks of sanity.

Facts are only tools to gain control over yourself and other people.

Fanatics are, for one thing, boring and, for another, unreliable. They tend to burn out just when you need them.

you know a person is having a severe personality crisis if you see a high school class ring on a finger beyond the first semester in college. Male or female. It's a big sign saying nothing has mattered to my life since senior year.

All systems require myths for their longevity.

I am a huge fan of the Black woman. I never hesitate to recommend her when times are bad or things go wrong.

But nonviolence was never for the oppressor; it was for the oppressed.

America may not be the best nation on earth, but it has conceived loftier ideals and dreamed higher dreams than any other nation. America is a heterogeneous nation of many different people of different races, religions, and creeds. Should this experiment go forth and prosper, we will have offered humans a new way to look at life; should it fail, we will simply go the way of all failed civilizations.

If i can't have what i want . . . then my job is to want what i've got and be satisfied that at least there is something more to want

daddy says the world is a drum tight and hard and i told him i’m gonna beat out my own rhythm

Sacred cows make very poor gladiators.

In the name of peace They waged the wars ain't they got no shame

I'm glad I understand that while language is a gift, listening is a responsibility. (U.S. poet and writer, 1943- )

I grow old though pleased with my memories The tasks I can no longer complete Are balanced by the love of the tasks gone past I offer no apology only this plea: When I am frayed and strained and drizzle at the end Please someone cut a square and put me in a quilt That I might keep some child warm And some old person with no one else to talk to Will hear my whispers And cuddle near

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

i hope i die warmed by the life that i tried to live