164 Quotes by Rita Dove

I believe people may have a predisposition for artistic creativity. It doesn’t mean they’re going to make it.

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.

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

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.

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.

If our children are unable to voice what they mean, no one will know how they feel. If they can’t imagine a different world, they are stumbling through a darkness made all the more sinister by its lack of reference points. For a young person growing up in America’s alienated neighborhoods, there can be no greater empowerment than to dare to speak from the heart – and then to discover that one is not alone in ones feelings.

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

It’s unfortunate that sometimes in schools, there’s this need to have things quantified and graded.