Quotes By 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.

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.

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.

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

Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early.

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

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.

I write short stories, and I wrote a play.

Libraries are where it all begins.

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.

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.

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

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.