Top 35 Rita Dove Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Rita Dove Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

It makes me furious to hear haters of all skin colors -

It makes me furious to hear haters of all skin colors – especially Christian, Jewish, and Muslim fundamentalists – deride other people because of their different beliefs and lifestyles.
Rita Dove
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.
Rita Dove
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.
Rita Dove
When we are touched by something it’s as if we’re being brushed by an angel’s wings.
Rita Dove
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.
Rita Dove
Libraries are where it all begins.
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.
Rita Dove
Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.
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.
Rita Dove
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.
Rita Dove
The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I’ve seen ecstasy or something.
Rita Dove
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.
Rita Dove
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.
Rita Dove
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.
Rita Dove
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.
Rita Dove
To practice your scales, so to speak, in order play the symphony, is what you have to do as a young poet.
Rita Dove
My favorite poets may not be your bread and butter. I have more favorite poems than favorite poets.
Rita Dove
I think children have talent and insight, but it gets beaten out of them.
Rita Dove
The joy of working at something to find out what it means to me is what I grew up with.
Rita Dove
For years, I had heard about the lack of interest in literature in the U.S. and I had complained about it. I failed to understand how people could fail to be moved by art.
Rita Dove
For many years, I thought a poem was a whisper overheard, not an aria heard.
Rita Dove
Equality and self-determination should never be divided in the name of religious or ideological fervor.
Rita Dove
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.
Rita Dove
I carry a notebook with me everywhere. But that’s only the first step.
Rita Dove
What is ironic is that Allen Ginsberg’s importance was in its twilight for so many years that it took his death to bring it to the front page. He electrified an entire world!
Rita Dove
If we really want to be full and generous in spirit, we have no choice but to trust at some level.
Rita Dove
There are times in life when, instead of complaining, you do something about your complaints.
Rita Dove
What writing does is to reveal.
Rita Dove
I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age.
Rita Dove
I didn’t know writers could be real live people, because I never knew any writers.
Rita Dove
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.
Rita Dove
People write me from all over the country, asking me, a

People write me from all over the country, asking me, and sometimes even telling me, what they think a poet laureate should do. I found that immensely valuable.
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.
Rita Dove
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.
Rita Dove
I prefer to explore the most intimate moments, the smaller, crystallized details we all hinge our lives on.
Rita Dove