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101 " 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."-Nikki Giovanni "
― Nikki Giovanni
102 " I know this it is difficult to grow up it always was it always will be I know this nobody can tell you how to do it You just make the same mistakes and You just thrill to the same excitementI know this Life is a good idea "
― Nikki Giovanni , Acolytes
103 " I am always lonely for things I've never had and people I've never been. "
104 " We need poetry . . . We deserve poetryWe owe it to ourselves to re-create ourselves and find a different if not better way to live "
105 " I mine the human soulFor undiscovered strength. "
― Nikki Giovanni , Ego-Tripping and Other Poems for Young People
106 " Poems have serious business to do They need to bring down presidents whoStart wars they themselves wouldn't go to "
107 " once a snowflake fellon my brow and i lovedit so much and i kissedit and it was happy and called its cousinsand brothers and a webof snow engulfed me theni reached to love them alland i squeezed them and they becamea spring rain and i stood perfectlystill and was a flower"Winter Poem "
108 " All we can do, I believe, is take the love and give the love and try to remember who dreamed dreams of us. And try to be faithful to that. "
109 " I am from Appalachia. The Tennessee mountains with the early evenings and that great morning light made storytellers out of all of us. "
― Nikki Giovanni , Chasing Utopia: A Hybrid
110 " Love is in short supplyLike leaves on a winter vineWhether it's right or whether it's wrongI'll pay the price for mine "
― Nikki Giovanni , Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day
111 " Poets should be ashamed To die Before they kiss The sun "
112 " I don't need an overseas enemy / I have a father "
113 " Silence I wondered why Grandmother and Grandpapa could sit in Silence on the front porch She smoked a cigarette He didn’t Sitting on the swing in Silence I washed the dishes and cleaned up the kitchen trying to figure out why they sat in Silence Then I got to be my own age with my own deck and my own person and I understood "
― Nikki Giovanni , Make Me Rain: Poems & Prose
114 " ~ “I am so hip even my errors are correct "
115 " and neither of them ever said what they meant and i guess nobody ever does "
― Nikki Giovanni , My House
116 " what you doing here" she asked "i'm a poet" i said "that ain't no reason to be uppity "
117 " Mississippi recently, and recently being 1994, finally ratified the Thirteenth Amendment and agreed that the Civil War was over and black people are free. I'm talking 1994. So you know it is kind of time that people got caught up. It's a shame that we are still looking at a world that can use those kinds of concepts, that can think some people have no right to be free.Everybody owns themselves. It's all we've got. We have every right to be us. We have every right to satisfy our own needs with the life that we were given. I have no idea, no concept, of why people could ever thing that they could own other people. "
― Nikki Giovanni , Shimmy Shimmy Shimmy Like My Sister Kate: Looking At The Harlem Renaissance Through Poems
118 " some say we are responsiblefor those we loveothers know we are responsiblefor those who love us "
― Nikki Giovanni , The Women and the Men
119 " honey, ain't never been wrong yet you better get back to the city cause you one of them technical niggers and you'll have problems here "
120 " and sometimes on rainy nights you see an old white woman who maybe you'd really care about except that you're a young Black woman whose job it is to kill maim or seriously make her question the validity of her existence "