Rita Dove Quotes

80 quotes in 1040 categories

• 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,…
• The First Book: Go ahead, it won't bite. Well... maybe a little. More a nip, like. A tingle. It's pleasurable, really. You see, it keeps…
• When I was young, I was older than I am today.
• 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…
• 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,…
• 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…
• 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…
• The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something
• 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
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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
• Everybody who's anybody longs to be a tree.
• My childhood library was small enough not to be intimidating. And yet I felt the whole world was contained in those two rooms. I could…
• Creative writing and literacy go hand and hand.
• We should always do something that makes us feel like a child again. Keep learning, no matter what it is.
• Don't be so fast, you're all you've got.
• 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…
• The library is an arena of possibility, opening both a window into the soul and a door onto the world.

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