Quotes By 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.

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

Without imagination we can go nowhere. And imagination is not restricted to the arts. Every scientist I have met who has been a success has had to imagine.

I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding.

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 think reading Shakespeare's plays when I was young was extremely important. He had the ability to make utter strangers come alive.

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!

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.

Have you ever heard a good joke? If you've ever heard someone just right, with the right pacing, then you're already on the way to poetry. It's about using words in very precise ways and using gesture.

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!

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.

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

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

If we really want to be full and generous in spirit, we have no choice but to trust at some level.

Libraries are where it all begins.

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.

The joy of working at something to find out what it means to me is what I grew up with.

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.

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

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.

I didn't know writers could be real live people, because I never knew any writers.

Rap is only one end of a whole spectrum of verbal play and virtuosity. Rap is geared for aural pleasure.

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

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.