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...i believe
the most beautiful poem
...is your heart
racing

— Nikki Giovanni The Women and The Men (1970)

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Beauty

More quotes by Nikki Giovanni

The authority of the writer always overcomes the skepticism of the reader.

The Authority of a Writer (2024)

Poetry is the culture of a people. We are poets even when we don’t write poems; just look at our life, our rhythms, our tenderness, our signifying, our sermons and our songs.

I'm a big fan of the black woman and so I'm always looking at aspects of the black woman--what she's doing and how she does it.

The Authority of a Writer (2024)

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: Interview (2008)

If I were advising someone on a writing career, the deal is this: write. If you get it published, good. If somebody pays you, better, because you have to eat, but the deal is you have to write.

The Authority of a Writer (2024)

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Beautiful objects are wrought by study through effort, but ugly things are reaped automatically without toil.

Democritus Freeman (1948)

True beauty dwells in deep retreats,
Whose veil is unremoved
Till heart with heart in concord beats,
And the lover is beloved.

William Wordsworth

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

André Gide The Immoralist (1902)

Beauty itself doth of itself persuade
The eyes of men without an orator.

William Shakespeare The Rape of Lucrece (1594)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Nikki Giovanni (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.