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Equality and self-determination should never be divided in the name of religious or ideological fervor.

Rita Dove

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Rita Dove
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: August 28
Essayist
Poet
Professor
Writer
Akron
Ohio
Rita Frances Dove
Religious
Self
Fervor
Never
Ideological
Divided
Equality
Determination
Name
Names

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If you can't be free, be a mystery.
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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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I believe people may have a predisposition for artistic creativity. It doesn't mean they're going to make it.
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The library is an arena of possibility, opening both a window into the soul and a door onto the world.
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If only the sun-drenched celebrities are being noticed and worshiped, then our children are going to have a tough time seeing the value in the shadows, where the thinkers, probers and scientists are keeping society together.
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Being true to yourself really means being true to all the complexities of the human spirit.
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Sometimes a word is found so right it trembles at the slightest explanation.
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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 mean to each other.
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If we really want to be full and generous in spirit, we have no choice but to trust at some level.
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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, This is when I became myself.
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What writing does is to reveal.
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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.
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Don't be so fast, you're all you've got.
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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.
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I'm never quite sure how the poem is going to resolve itself and that I'm always in some way surprised. I make a discovery in a poem as I write it.
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We tend to be so bombarded with information, and we move so quickly, that there's a tendency to treat everything on the surface level and process things quickly. This is antithetical to the kind of openness and perception you have to have to be receptive to poetry.poetry seems to exist in a parallel universe outside daily life in America.
Rita Dove
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The joy of working at something to find out what it means to me is what I grew up with.
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Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.
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At the very beginning when I begin writing a poem I try not to think of the audience or anyone at all except for trying to get at the very center of what is driving that poem. In a way it's like analyzing myself.
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Rap is only one end of a whole spectrum of verbal play and virtuosity. Rap is geared for aural pleasure.
Rita Dove