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If you can't be free, be a mystery.

Rita Dove

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Rita Dove
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: August 28
Essayist
Poet
Professor
Writer
Akron
Ohio
Rita Frances Dove
Mystery
Free

More quotes by Rita Dove

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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.
Rita Dove
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Courage has nothing to do with our determination to be great. It has to do with what we decide in that moment when we are called upon to be more.
Rita Dove
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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
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Don't be so fast, you're all you've got.
Rita Dove
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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
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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.
Rita Dove
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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
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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
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Can it be that even as one grows to fit the space one lives in, one cannot grow until there's space to grow?
Rita Dove
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I was pirouette and flourish, I was filigree and flame. How could I count my blessings when I didn't know their names?
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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I write short stories, and I wrote a play.
Rita Dove
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I believe people may have a predisposition for artistic creativity. It doesn't mean they're going to make it.
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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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
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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.
Rita Dove
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Libraries are where it all begins.
Rita Dove
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Sometimes a word is found so right it trembles at the slightest explanation.
Rita Dove
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The library is an arena of possibility, opening both a window into the soul and a door onto the world.
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