Quotes by Rita Dove
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.
There are times in life when, instead of complaining, you do something about your complaints.
If we really want to be full and generous in spirit, we have no choice but to trust at some level.
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.
What writing does is to reveal.
I think children have talent and insight, but it gets beaten out of them.
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.
I think reading Shakespeare's plays when I was young was extremely important. He had the ability to make utter strangers come alive.
I grew up in Ohio, where civil-rights accomplishments had already begun to accelerate before Martin Luther King appeared. In hindsight, we know that many people, black and white, were instrumental in changing the Jim Crow status quo on all levels.
I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age.
Libraries are where it all begins.
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.
All of us have moments in our childhood where we come alive for the first time. And we go back to those moments and think, This is when I became myself.
Nothing is too small. Nothing is too, quote-unquote, ordinary or insignificant. Those are the things that make up the measure of our days, and they're the things that sustain us. And they're the things that certainly can become worthy of poetry.
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.
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.
It's the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.
I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.
It's unfortunate that sometimes in schools, there's this need to have things quantified and graded.
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 make a discovery in a poem as I write it.
I always loved science. And in fact, I got a science award in high school. I mean, I loved science, but I think I loved literature more.
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.
I'm a night person. My best times are midnight to six, actually.
