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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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Rita Dove
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: August 28
Essayist
Poet
Professor
Writer
Akron
Ohio
Rita Frances Dove
Soul
Arena
World
Onto
Opening
Library
Door
Window
Possibility
Doors

More quotes by 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.
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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?
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Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.
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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.
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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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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!
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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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We should always do something that makes us feel like a child again. Keep learning, no matter what it is.
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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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If you can't be free, be a mystery.
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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.
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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!
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The joy of working at something to find out what it means to me is what I grew up with.
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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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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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
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Don't be so fast, you're all you've got.
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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When we are touched by something it's as if we're being brushed by an angel's wings.
Rita Dove