Rita Dove Quotes
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I didn't know writers could be real live people, because I never knew any writers.
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I prefer to explore the most intimate moments, the smaller, crystallized details we all hinge our lives on.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It's the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.
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Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.
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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.
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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.
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What writing does is to reveal.
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I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.
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Being true to yourself really means being true to all the complexities of the human spirit.
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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.
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It's unfortunate that sometimes in schools, there's this need to have things quantified and graded.