Time & Perspective Quote by Nikki Giovanni

Urgency is doing most of the work here: Giovanni frames truth not as a lofty ideal but as an appointment we keep postponing until it’s too late. The line is deceptively plainspoken, almost conversational, and that’s the trap. By choosing “now” and “good time” - the language of calendars, politeness, and social convenience - she exposes how societies launder avoidance into etiquette. If the truth requires the right ambiance, it will never arrive.

The subtext is a critique of strategic patience, that familiar civic sedative: wait for the backlash to cool, wait for the election to pass, wait until people are “ready.” Giovanni’s speaker refuses the comforting fiction that history offers clean openings. Instead, she suggests the opposite: “good times” are often manufactured precisely to keep certain truths off the table - about race, power, violence, complicity. The conditional “If” carries a bite of skepticism, while “I don’t see” signals a moral eyesight test. Who exactly is unable to see? Or who benefits from pretending not to?

Context matters: Giovanni’s voice emerges from the Black Arts Movement and the long afterlife of civil rights rhetoric, where “truth” is never neutral. It’s testimony, indictment, survival knowledge. The line lands like a call-and-response with America’s recurring habit of asking the aggrieved to be patient, palatable, and strategic. Its intent isn’t just to demand honesty; it’s to collapse the excuses that delay it, making procrastination look as reckless as it is.