Quotes By Rita Dove

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

The sound of the mandolin is a very curious sound because it's cheerful and melancholy at the same time, and I think it comes from that shadow string, the double strings.

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.

My favorite poets may not be your bread and butter. I have more favorite poems than favorite poets.

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

It really wasn't until I was in college when I began to write more and more, and I realized I was scheduling my entire life around my writing.

Under adversity, under oppression, the words begin to fail, the easy words begin to fail. In order to convey things accurately, the human being is almost forced to find the most precise words possible, which is a precondition for literature.

I was appointed Poet Laureate. It came totally out of the blue because most Poet Laureates had been considerably older than I. It was not something that I even had begun to dream about!

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.

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 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.

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.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

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

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

To write for PC reasons, because you think you ought to be dealing with this subject, is never going to yield anything that is really going to matter to anyone else. It has to matter to you.

Libraries are where it all begins.