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I think children have talent and insight, but it gets beaten out of them.

Rita Dove

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Rita Dove
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: August 28
Essayist
Poet
Professor
Writer
Akron
Ohio
Rita Frances Dove
Talent
Children
Think
Thinking
Beaten
Insight
Gets

More quotes by Rita Dove

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I carry a notebook with me everywhere. But that's only the first step.
Rita Dove
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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
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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 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
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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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My inspiration comes from everywhere, just walking down the street and I never know where it's going to come from, so I keep a notebook with me at all times and the only criteria for anything making it into that notebook is if it stops me in my tracks for even an instant, if it catches my eye or my ear and I just write it down.
Rita Dove
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A good poem is like a bouillon cube. It's concentrated and it nourishes you when you need it.
Rita Dove
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For many years, I thought a poem was a whisper overheard, not an aria heard.
Rita Dove
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Libraries are where it all begins.
Rita Dove
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I think reading Shakespeare's plays when I was young was extremely important. He had the ability to make utter strangers come alive.
Rita Dove
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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
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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.
Rita Dove
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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.
Rita Dove
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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.
Rita Dove
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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
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There are times in life when, instead of complaining, you do something about your complaints.
Rita Dove
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What writing does is to reveal.
Rita Dove
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Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.
Rita Dove
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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.
Rita Dove
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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.
Rita Dove