Giovanni's Quotes

#1. Giovanni's behavior had changed dramatically since he had opened that crate. He felt haunted. [After meeting the portrait of Botticelli's Bastard]

Stephen Maitland-Lewis

#2. I understood why Giovanni had wanted me and had brought me to his last retreat. I was to destroy this room and give to Giovanni a new and better life. This life could only be my own, which, in order to transform Giovanni's, must first become a part of Giovanni's room.

James Baldwin

#3. I dare you to read a book this weekend! War and Peace? To Kill a Mocking Bird? Catcher in the Rye? The Heart is a Lonely Hunter? For Whom the Bell Tolls? As i lay Dying? Giovanni's Room? The Bell Jar? These books changed my life. #artforfreedom #rebelheart

Madonna Ciccone

#4. I scarcely know how to describe that room. It became, in a way, every room I had ever been in and every room I find myself in hereafter will remind me of Giovanni's room.

James Baldwin

#5. Fix me, please. I want to be yours forever. My breathing stopped s I started back at him. He looked scared, like I might say no. I shook my head and his eyes fell. "Adam," I Said, and his eyes role again; I can't fix you. Only you can do that, but I'm your despite it

Cassandra Giovanni

#6. I grew up with Scientology - my parents at one point were clerical. It's a pragmatic philosophy, not merely a belief system. Yeah, it's had media exposure because certain luminaries do Scientology, but millions of people do it who are not celebrities. It's not a threat or some cult.

Giovanni Ribisi

#7. I'm an old storyteller. [When] I tell the story, it's about the story.

Nikki Giovanni

#8. Stockholm is surely an urban planner's dream. Everything works. Everything looks good.

Janine Di Giovanni

#9. It's hard for the Catholic Church to accept change. When the mass was no longer said in Latin, loyalists went into mourning for years.

Janine Di Giovanni

#10. I'm into my Black Thing
And it's filling all
My empty spots

Nikki Giovanni

#11. 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.

Nikki Giovanni

#12. Death abides by no one's rules ... it takes what pleases it without consciousness to its decisions. It destroys what it will. It took the pieces of perfection I once knew and shattered them. Now what remains are shards of a dream, drawing blood with every step.

Cassandra Giovanni

#13. What's the difference between dragging a black man behind a truck in Jasper, Texas, and beating a white boy to death in Wyoming because he's gay?

Nikki Giovanni

#14. The cat is in the sack, but the sack is not closed. The cat is in it, but it's open ... and it's a wild cat.

Giovanni Trapattoni

#15. I'm really happy with where I am, the movies in my life. Not satisfied, necessarily. But I won't put it on somebody else, blame anybody else for my position in the business. It's the choices I have made.

Giovanni Ribisi

#16. 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.

Nikki Giovanni

#17. 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.

Nikki Giovanni

#18. No perfection can last forever. Time tears at it; wears it down until it's nothing, just an empty shell.

Cassandra Giovanni

#19. Hats, giant shades and 60-plus sunblock are part of my summer repertoire. I don't want wrinkles, but it's skin cancer I truly fear.

Janine Di Giovanni

#20. 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.

Nikki Giovanni

#21. Once Iraq became a hot bed for kidnapping, reporters had to use every kind of trick they could manage to avoid it. This included chase cars, security men for more prosperous agencies and networks, and GPS signals on satellite phones that could pinpoint the journalist's locations.

Janine Di Giovanni

#22. Poets can tell the truth as they see it. It's the author's story, the author's voice.

Nikki Giovanni

#23. Because I absolutely, positively cannot fuck you, Lola, he says like it's a formal declaration.
I furrow my brow and salute him, which makes him snicker.

Bianca Giovanni

#24. His eyes were like a doll's eyes, lifeless, black and empty as if he had no soul. With a devious smile he nodded as if to acknowledge "game on", the battle is now joined.

Daniel Michael Giovanni

#25. Only if there's an outbreak of the bubonic plague.

Giovanni Trapattoni

#26. Violence is like money in the bank; it's only helpful if you don't have to use it.

Nikki Giovanni

#27. What an actor says is much, much less important than a life, so that's the great use for improvisation; you go, you find the life and then you add the words.

Giovanni Ribisi

#28. But in its final creation it was not the part of the Father's power to fail as though exhausted. It was not the part of His wisdom to waver in a needful matter through poverty of counsel.

Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola

#29. Because Nina's Simone 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

#30. Just so you know I don't really feel like you kidnapped me - it's more like assisted running away by coincidence.

Cassandra Giovanni

#31. The first two letters of the name Pluto are the initials of Percival Lowell. Its symbol is , a planetary monogram. But Lowell's lifelong love was the planet Mars. He was electrified by the announcement in 1877 by an Italian astronomer, Giovanni Schiaparelli, of canali on Mars.

Carl Sagan

#32. What's sad is that there is an addictive quality to that, to believing your own hype; to allowing yourself to become validated by others and no longer by yourself. That's the danger of celebrity.

Giovanni Ribisi

#33. You have to take into account it was the cell phone that became what the modern-day concept of a phone call is, and this is a device that's attached to your hip 24/7. Before that there was 'leave a message' and before that there was 'hopefully you're home.'

Giovanni Ribisi

#34. 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.

Nikki Giovanni

#35. My mother told me I was begging her to be an actor when I was four. My father and my grandfather saw at least one or two movies a week; they were film buffs, so I guess it just rubbed off on me. And now it's kind of become a way of life for me.

Giovanni Ribisi

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

Nikki Giovanni

#37. 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.

Nikki Giovanni

#38. Everything starts with writing. I heard Nikki Giovanni and was blown away. I just thought 'wow'; she was writing from a black girl's perspective, and the imagery was so vivid that I started doing spoken word.

Jill Scott

#39. For the first five years of Luca's life, I desperately wanted to be a good mother and not to pass on this trauma and darkness that his father and I had experienced, but there's a danger of suffocating your kids, too.

Janine Di Giovanni

#40. From the earliest age, I was just different. I think that's part of every writer's little revenge. You think, 'I'm not a blonde, blue-eyed cheerleader but I'm going to get out of here and do something.'

Janine Di Giovanni

#41. I'm old fashioned with my cell phone. I like that human contact and I think it's important.

Giovanni Ribisi

#42. I used to shy away from publicity so as not to let it get in the way of the work. But it's part of the job. The tabloids are a whole other arena. If fame happens, it happens. I just want to maintain focus.

Giovanni Ribisi

#43. I know being pregnant and giving birth is the most wonderful thing on Earth. I know that after you have a baby, there is a sense of addiction, a need to have another. It's biological.

Janine Di Giovanni

#44. Tomorrow night, I'll sink to an all new low! Lemme rephrase that... Tomorrow night, I'll be at rock bottom! No, that doesn't sound good either... Tomorrow night, I'll be in Giovanni Schiaparelli's favorite hole! Okay, I admit I'm just fucking around now.

Andy Weir

#45. Posttraumatic stress is something that's always existed. I think that the earliest recording was during the Trojan War, but it's only recently that we're beginning to be aware of it.

Janine Di Giovanni

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

Nikki Giovanni

#47. I'm so critical of myself. I'm actually really, really proud of the film. It's really cool to see a movie at Sundance because everybody is so supportive.

Giovanni Ribisi

#48. The important thing is not establishing if you are afraid or not but it's to be able to live with your own fear without being influenced by it. Otherwise it's not courage anymore, but recklessness.

Giovanni Falcone

#49. 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

Nikki Giovanni

#50. Every time I look at you I think to myself that I've found perfection. Adam said as he shifted his weight over me. I Looked at him and smiled, 'Now that's flawed perfection".

Cassandra Giovanni

#51. Nikki Giovanni, 'We love because it's the only true adventure.

Tracy Ewens

#52. Acting is ephemeral. It's not like making a painting that lasts forever. You're doing something, and the very action which comes and goes, is being demonstrated in front of you. Within that process, you're trying to go against the grain.

Giovanni Ribisi

#53. It was not the part of His kindly love that he who was to praise God's divine generosity in regard to others should be compelled to condemn it in regard to himself.

Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola

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

Nikki Giovanni

#55. I don't think that many people today, understand the nature of what an improv does for an actor in a specific setting. What an improv does for an actor is help him find the life; it's the life that an actor's after.

Giovanni Ribisi

#56. 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.

Nikki Giovanni

#57. If I can't do what I want to do, then my job is to not do what I want to do. It's not the same thing, but it's the best thing I can do.

Nikki Giovanni

#58. It's better to repent what you enjoyed than to repent not having enjoyed anything.

Giovanni Boccaccio

#59. It is a well known urban myth that the French don't trust banks and store their money under their mattress. It's not that they are tight with money - they just don't trust anyone.

Janine Di Giovanni

#60. 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.

Nikki Giovanni

#61. To be a good reporter, writing about war, you have to write about the people. It's not about the tanks or the RPGs or military strategy. It's always about the effect war has on civilians, on society, and how it disrupts and destroys lives.

Janine Di Giovanni

#62. I want to express our grieve and condolences to the families of two hostages: one American, Dr. Warren Weinstein and an Italian Giovanni LaPorto who were tragically killed in a U.S. counterterrorism operation.

Barack Obama

#63. Oh Lola's Boobs,' he says into my chest, 'I wish we knew each other better.'
I crack up laughing.
'What's that you say?' he jokes, putting his ear to my right breast. 'You wish you could come out to play more often but Lola doesn't let you? Well, that's a shame.

Bianca Giovanni

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

Nikki Giovanni

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

Nikki Giovanni

#66. Fiammetta, whose wavy tresses fell in a flood of gold over her white and delicate shoulders

Giovanni Boccaccio

#67. Poets should be ashamed
To die
Before they kiss
The sun

Nikki Giovanni

#68. I have people calling me cute. Like I'm a fucking puppy!" she sneered at me, pushing me aside in order to continue on her way. "I am Melody Giovanni Callahan, cute is not the adjective used to describe me!

J.J. McAvoy

#69. Go to hell, Giovanni."
"Tesoro, take a good look at me. You've already put me there.

Bethany-Kris

#70. No-thing less splendid than a golden sepulchre would have suited so noble a heart.

Giovanni Boccaccio

#71. We in the Black Arts movement, which wasn't really a movement but a group of people who had similar objectives ...

Nikki Giovanni

#72. I hoped to burn out, through Hella, my image of Giovanni and the reality of his touch - I hoped to drive out fire with fire.

James Baldwin

#73. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, humans resist change. Change will occur; vacuums will be filled.

Nikki Giovanni

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

Nikki Giovanni

#75. The problem with love is not what we feel but what we wish we felt when we began to feel we should feel something.

Nikki Giovanni

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

Nikki Giovanni

#77. 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

#78. I have some crack sources - cops who call me, and say, "Hey, there's a dead body in Civic Park, try not to beat the homicide detectives there."
- Gabriella Giovanni, BLESSED ARE THE DEAD

Kristi Belcamino

#79. There's the concept that if I do this big budget project, then that will help me do the things I really want to do and bring more money to those films.

Giovanni Ribisi

#80. One usually dies because one is alone, or because one has got into something over one's head. One often dies because one does not have the right alliances, because one is not given support. In Sicily the Mafia kills the servants of the State that the State has not been able to protect.

Giovanni Falcone

#81. I'd lost myself in the abyss of someone else's tyranny ... again.

Cassandra Giovanni

#82. Man's place in the universe is somewhere between the beasts and the angels, but, because of the divine image planted in him, there are no limits to what man can accomplish ...

Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola

#83. Everything we call a trial, a sorrow, or a duty, believe me, that angel's hand is there.

Giovanni Giocondo

#84. 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

#85. For so long music has been my heart, but now it's you ... you're my heart.

Cassandra Giovanni

#86. 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.

Nikki Giovanni

#87. I feel I've lost every part of me ... there's nothing left but the parts I've given to you. I need you to hold those pieces together. Please don't forget who I was ... then ... then there really will be nothing left.

Cassandra Giovanni

#88. 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

#89. There are things you stand up for because it's right.

Nikki Giovanni

#90. He was a throwback to a lady's old romantic notion of how a man should act. [Giovanni Tempesta]

Vincent B. "Chip" LoCoco

#91. Tomorrow night, I'll be in Giovanni Schiaparelli's favorite hole!

Andy Weir

#92. I just consider myself a committed actor. If a movie is a success, that's great; I'm happy for that. But I've learned just to concentrate on my job and do the best that I can.

Giovanni Ribisi

#93. If you do improvising, it can sometimes end up being a waste of time. And if you do that, it's more or less based on a writing process.

Giovanni Ribisi

#94. During war time, when people were injured, I was really frustrated I did not become a doctor. It's painful not being able to save people, witnessing their pain.

Janine Di Giovanni

#95. I want to be a part of something that's good and intellectually challenging.

Giovanni Ribisi

#96. 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.

Nikki Giovanni

#97. Death is a slave's freedom.

Nikki Giovanni

#98. 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.

Nikki Giovanni

#99. It's always disappointing to come across phony do-gooders. And it's easy to scoff at celebrities working in war zones.

Janine Di Giovanni

#100. If I had to choose criteria, for me, it's about first the director. I want to be a part of something that's good and intellectually challenging. After the director it's the character and the story. That's the deal for me.

Giovanni Ribisi