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Listen how they say your name. If they can't say that right, there's no way they're going to know how to treat you proper, neither.

Rita Dove

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Rita Dove
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: August 28
Essayist
Poet
Professor
Writer
Akron
Ohio
Rita Frances Dove
Name
Names
Right
Going
Proper
Way
Treat
Treats
Neither
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More quotes by 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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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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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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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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Don't be so fast, you're all you've got.
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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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
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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
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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
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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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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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I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding.
Rita Dove
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I write short stories, and I wrote a play.
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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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 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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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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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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There are times in life when, instead of complaining, you do something about your complaints.
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