Quotes By Rita Dove

My father is a chemist, my mother was a homemaker. My parents instilled in us the feeling that learning was the most exciting thing that could happen to you, and it never ends.

I loved to write when I was a child. I wrote, but I always thought it was something that you did as a child, then you put away childish things.

If they don't read, if they don't love reading; if they don't find themselves compulsively reading, I don't think they're really a writer.

Going to the library was the one place we got to go without asking for permission. And they let us choose what we wanted to read. It was a feeling of having a book be mine entirely.

If we really want to be full and generous in spirit, we have no choice but to trust at some level.

I think children have talent and insight, but it gets beaten out of them.

I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age.

I prefer to explore the most intimate moments, the smaller, crystallized details we all hinge our lives on.

In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things.

Libraries are where it all begins.

The joy of working at something to find out what it means to me is what I grew up with.

I have a high guilt quotient. A poem can go through as many as 50 or 60 drafts. It can take from a day to two years-or longer.

I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.

You have to imagine it possible before you can see something. You can have the evidence right in front of you, but if you can't imagine something that has never existed before, it's impossible.

One definition of eternity is that we are not alone on this planet, that there are those who've gone before and those who will come, and that there is a community of spirits.

I keep the drafts of each poem in color-coded folders. I pick up the folders according to how I feel about that color that day.

For many years, I thought a poem was a whisper overheard, not an aria heard.

I didn't know writers could be real live people, because I never knew any writers.

Rap is only one end of a whole spectrum of verbal play and virtuosity. Rap is geared for aural pleasure.

I thought, after the Pulitzer, at least nothing will surprise me quite that much in my life. And another one happened. It was quite amazing.

There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry.

Being true to yourself really means being true to all the complexities of the human spirit.

I loved to read, but I always thought that the dream was too far away. The person who had written the book was a god, it wasn't a person.

I believe people may have a predisposition for artistic creativity. It doesn't mean they're going to make it.

The American Dream is a phrase we'll have to wrestle with all of our lives. It means a lot of things to different people. I think we're redefining it now.

It's unfortunate that sometimes in schools, there's this need to have things quantified and graded.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something.

I carry a notebook with me everywhere. But that's only the first step.

It's the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.