Rita Dove Quotes
Top 66 wise famous quotes and sayings by Rita Dove
Rita Dove Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Rita Dove on Wise Famous Quotes.
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.
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.
By making us stop for a moment, poetry gives us an opportunity to think about ourselves as human beings on this planet and what we mean to each other.
We should always do something that makes us feel like a child again. Keep learning, no matter what it is.
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.
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 was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age.
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.
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 was pirouette and flourish,
I was filigree and flame.
How could I count my blessings
when I didn't know their names?
I was filigree and flame.
How could I count my blessings
when I didn't know their names?
I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding.
Can it be that even as one grows to fit the space one lives in, one cannot grow until there's space to grow?
To practice your scales, so to speak, in order play the symphony, is what you have to do as a young poet.
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 if you put something in a file that says "war poems" or "love poems" that you already restrict the way in which the poem might move.
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.
I prefer to explore the most intimate moments, the smaller, crystallized details we all hinge our lives on.
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.
Against Self-Pity
It gets you nowhere but deeper into
your own shit
pure misery a luxury
one never learns to enjoy.
It gets you nowhere but deeper into
your own shit
pure misery a luxury
one never learns to enjoy.
The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something.
Listen how they say your name. If they can't say that right, there's no way they're going to know how to treat you proper, neither.
Rap is only one end of a whole spectrum of verbal play and virtuosity. Rap is geared for aural pleasure.
I think that when a poem can move readers across generations and across its specific class or race then it becomes truly classic.
It's the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.
Equality and self-determination should never be divided in the name of religious or ideological fervor.
The library is an arena of possibility, opening both a window into the soul and a door onto the world.
I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.
I believe people may have a predisposition for artistic creativity. It doesn't mean they're going to make it.
I tell you, if you feel strange,
strange things will happen to you:
Fallen peacocks on library shelves
strange things will happen to you:
Fallen peacocks on library shelves
Courage has nothing to do with our determination to be great. It has to do with what we decide in that moment when we are called upon to be more.