Quote

I carry a notebook with me everywhere. But that's only the first step.

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
First
Notebook
Everywhere
Carry
Step
Steps
Firsts

More quotes by Rita Dove

Image
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
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
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
What is ironic is that Allen Ginsberg's importance was in its twilight for so many years that it took his death to bring it to the front page. He electrified an entire world!
Rita Dove
Image
If you can't be free, be a mystery.
Rita Dove
Image
There are times in life when, instead of complaining, you do something about your complaints.
Rita Dove
Image
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!
Rita Dove
Image
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.
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
I change jobs like drinking water ... And as I grow accustomed to the new flavor of a drink I regard as delicious, yes, vital, something fades, life balks. So I break camp I shed skins.
Rita Dove
Image
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.
Rita Dove
Image
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.
Rita Dove
Image
Sometimes a word is found so right it trembles at the slightest explanation.
Rita Dove
Image
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.
Rita Dove
Image
We should always do something that makes us feel like a child again. Keep learning, no matter what it is.
Rita Dove
Image
For many years, I thought a poem was a whisper overheard, not an aria heard.
Rita Dove
Image
I've always felt that the poems I've written which have historical context are hopefully not just simply plucking something out of history and saying great, let's write about that. In every case what has happened is that I've become fascinated or haunted by something and couldn't shake it.
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
The library is an arena of possibility, opening both a window into the soul and a door onto the world.
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