Quotes About Nikki Giovanni

#1. Nikki Giovanni! I got a book of hers from the library, and there was this woman who could paint me on paper with words - my whole little experience. I thought it was wonderful.

Jill Scott

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

Tracy Ewens

#3. I could hear music playing in the background of works by certain authors, like Poe and Shakespeare. And I discovered Nikki Giovanni when I was in eighth grade. Her writing has a musical energy with pulse and rhythm, almost like jazz or hip-hop.

Jill Scott

#4. 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

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

Nikki Giovanni

#6. 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

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

Nikki Giovanni

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

Nikki Giovanni

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

Nikki Giovanni

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

Nikki Giovanni

#11. 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

#12. One stands, in fact, in awe of the Constitution of the United States, though it is an idea and not quite a reality.

Nikki Giovanni

#13. Life is a process where people mix and match, fall apart and come back together.

Nikki Giovanni

#14. Black love is black wealth

Nikki Giovanni

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

Nikki Giovanni

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

Nikki Giovanni

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. And i've begun
(as a reaction to a feeling)
to balance
the pleasure of loneliness
against the pain
of loving you
from Balances

Nikki Giovanni

#20. 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

#21. 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.

Nikki Giovanni

#22. The world is not a pleasant place to be without someone to hold and be held by.

Nikki Giovanni

#23. You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts because if you write with someone looking over you shoulder, you'll never write.

Nikki Giovanni

#24. 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.

Nikki Giovanni

#25. 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

#26. [My] Books are like puppies and children: you love each one for different reasons. I don't actually have a favorite because, if I were honest, I'm always more excited about what is coming.

Nikki Giovanni

#27. The poet can only write the poems; it takes the reader to complete the meaning.

Nikki Giovanni

#28. If you're a writer, the answer to everything is yes.

Nikki Giovanni

#29. A lot of people refuse to do things ...

Nikki Giovanni

#30. 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

#31. If you are sitting there waiting for someone to tell you how wonderful you are, you'll never get anything done. Women need to get over being women. I'm tired of that socialization of women; that we are always supposed to be sitting around pleasing somebody.

Nikki Giovanni

#32. DONT EVER BE AFRAID TO COME TO ME N CRY ... DONT EVER HESITATE TO LOOK ME N THE EYE DONT EVER BE AFRAID TO TELL ME HOW YOU FEEL. REMEMBAER YOUR MY GIRL N WE GOTTA KEEP IT REAL.

Nikki Giovanni

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

Nikki Giovanni

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

Nikki Giovanni

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

Nikki Giovanni

#36. Deal with yourself as a individual, worthy of respect and make everyone else deal with you the same way.

Nikki Giovanni

#37. Rage is to writers what water is to fish.

Nikki Giovanni

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

Nikki Giovanni

#39. If loneliness were a grape
the wine would be vintage
If it were a wood
the furniture would be mahogany
But since it is life it is
Cotton Candy
on a rainy day
The sweet soft essence
of possibility
Never quite maturing
from Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day

Nikki Giovanni

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

Nikki Giovanni

#41. 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.

Nikki Giovanni

#42. Poetry is motion graceful
as a fawn
gentle as a teardrop
strong like the eye
finding peace in a crowded room

Nikki Giovanni

#43. 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

#44. 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

Nikki Giovanni

#45. Death is a slave's freedom.

Nikki Giovanni

#46. 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

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

Nikki Giovanni

#48. 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.

Nikki Giovanni

#49. Show me someone not full of herself and I'll show you a hungry person.

Nikki Giovanni

#50. 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."

Nikki Giovanni

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

Nikki Giovanni

#52. Though I worship nothing (save myself)
You were my savior - so be it
And it was
Perhaps not never more or ever after
But after all - once you were mine

Nikki Giovanni

#53. It is not unusual to sift
through ashes
and find an unburnt picture

Nikki Giovanni

#54. And you will understand all too soon
That you, my children of battle, are your heroes

Nikki Giovanni

#55. I love you because no two snowflakes are alike, and it is possible, if you stand tippy-toe, to walk between the raindrops.

Nikki Giovanni

#56. I would put books on par with chocolate, because a good book is delicious.

Nikki Giovanni

#57. 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

#58. 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.

Nikki Giovanni

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

Nikki Giovanni

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

Nikki Giovanni

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

Nikki Giovanni

#62. We are strong enough to stand tall tearlessly, we are brave enough to bend to cry, and we are sad enough to know that we must laugh again.

Nikki Giovanni

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

Nikki Giovanni

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

Nikki Giovanni

#65. I share with the painters the desire
To put a three-dimensional picture
On a one-dimensional surface

from Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day

Nikki Giovanni

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

Nikki Giovanni

#67. 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

#68. You have to use what you have in order to get what you need and the people can not be rich unless somebody is rich. The Hip-Hop generation has carried more people with it than any other enterprise Black Americans have had.

Nikki Giovanni

#69. All systems require myths for their longevity.

Nikki Giovanni

#70. 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

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

Nikki Giovanni

#72. I always like summer
best

Nikki Giovanni

#73. 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

#74. I spend a lot of time learning about bird watching.

Nikki Giovanni

#75. I hope that, reading 'Rosa,' people will remember their own family and friends and talk about what they did and did not do.

Nikki Giovanni

#76. No one needs to teach you to be mean; we need to be taught to be kind.

Nikki Giovanni

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

Nikki Giovanni

#78. Ever been kidnapped by a poet if i were a poet i'd kidnap you put you in my phrases and meter ...

Nikki Giovanni

#79. Who I am really keeps surprising me.

Nikki Giovanni

#80. 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

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

Nikki Giovanni

#82. Everybody that loves freedom loves Harriet Tubman because she was determined not only to be free, but to make free as many people as she could.

Nikki Giovanni

#83. My work is a part of me and I know it. I have no reason to try to pick one part of me out from the rest. I only see my work, or rather I should say I see my work only telling my part of the human experience.

Nikki Giovanni

#84. Nothing is easy to the unwilling.

Nikki Giovanni

#85. Iife/personality must be taken as a total entity. All of your life is all of your life, and no one incident stands alone.

Nikki Giovanni

#86. 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

#87. I always loved English because whatever human beings are, we are storytellers. It is our stories that give a light to the future. When I went to college I became a history major because history is such a wonderful story of who we think we are. English is much more a story of who we really are.

Nikki Giovanni

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

Nikki Giovanni

#89. Educational progress is a national concern; education is a private one.

Nikki Giovanni

#90. Wind as old as Rome outside my window, inky fleece clouds against charcoal crushed velvet skies, fall feels soulful, like a LaBelle octave.

Brandi L. Bates

#91. FOR SONIA SANCHEZ

Nikki Giovanni

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

Nikki Giovanni

#93. we used to talk all night
and do things alone together

and i've begun
(as a reaction to a feeling)
to balance
the pleasure of loneliness
against the pain
of loving you

Nikki Giovanni

#94. The trip to Mars can only be understood through Black Americans. I say, the trip to Mars can only be understood through Black Americans.

Nikki Giovanni

#95. I'm just totally fascinated by people.

Nikki Giovanni

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

Nikki Giovanni

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

Nikki Giovanni

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

Nikki Giovanni

#99. 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.

Nikki Giovanni

#100. 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