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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.

Rita Dove

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Rita Dove
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: August 28
Essayist
Poet
Professor
Writer
Akron
Ohio
Rita Frances Dove
Thinking
Opportunity
Making
Planet
Moments
Planets
Human
Beings
Humans
Poetry
Giving
Gives
Mean
Stop
Think
Moment

More quotes by Rita Dove

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I carry a notebook with me everywhere. But that's only the first step.
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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?
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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
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Rap is only one end of a whole spectrum of verbal play and virtuosity. Rap is geared for aural pleasure.
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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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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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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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You have to imagine it possible before you can see something. You can have the evidence right in front of you, but if you can't imagine something that has never existed before, it's impossible.
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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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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Libraries are where it all begins.
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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Don't be so fast, you're all you've got.
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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When we are touched by something it's as if we're being brushed by an angel's wings.
Rita Dove
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If I begin writing a poem that means I'm intrigued in some way by whatever it's about and that if I'm not trying to find something new and pushing the envelope in the poem I can't expect my reader to be particularly excited about it either.
Rita Dove
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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.
Rita Dove