Quote

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

Rita Dove

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Rita Dove
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: August 28
Essayist
Poet
Professor
Writer
Akron
Ohio
Rita Frances Dove
Whisper
Poem
Heard
Thought
Many
Years
Overheard
Aria

More quotes by Rita Dove

Image
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.
Rita Dove
Image
If you can't be free, be a mystery.
Rita Dove
Image
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.
Rita Dove
Image
For years, I had heard about the lack of interest in literature in the U.S. and I had complained about the lack of respect artists got here. In my heart, I failed to understand how people could fail to be moved by art.
Rita Dove
Image
The American Dream is a phrase we'll have to wrestle with all of our lives. It means a lot of things to different people. I think we're redefining it now
Rita Dove
Image
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.
Rita Dove
Image
When we are touched by something it's as if we're being brushed by an angel's wings.
Rita Dove
Image
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.
Rita Dove
Image
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.
Rita Dove
Image
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.
Rita Dove
Image
Being true to yourself really means being true to all the complexities of the human spirit.
Rita Dove
Image
I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding.
Rita Dove
Image
Equality and self-determination should never be divided in the name of religious or ideological fervor.
Rita Dove
Image
Sometimes a word is found so right it trembles at the slightest explanation.
Rita Dove
Image
I think children have talent and insight, but it gets beaten out of them.
Rita Dove
Image
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.
Rita Dove
Image
What writing does is to reveal.
Rita Dove
Image
I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age.
Rita Dove
Image
I think that when a poem can move readers across generations and across its specific class or race then it becomes truly classic.
Rita Dove
Image
As an African-American, as a woman I think that I've been sensitized to the way in which history privileges the white male and the way in which certain aspects of history, the things that we are taught in school, the things that are handed down never, never entered the picture though they might have been very important.
Rita Dove