Rita Dove Quotes

Author Image

Rita Dove

Profession : Poet

Birth : August 28, 1952

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

Without imagination we can go nowhere. And imagination is not restricted to the arts. Every scientist I have met who has been a success has had to imagine.

Rita Dove

When we are touched by something it's as if we're being brushed by an angel's wings.

Rita Dove

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

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.

Rita Dove

Nothing is too small. Nothing is too, quote-unquote, ordinary or insignificant. Those are the things that make up the measure of our days, and they're the things that sustain us. And they're the things that certainly can become worthy of poetry.

Rita Dove

There are times in life when, instead of complaining, you do something about your complaints.

Rita Dove

Equality and self-determination should never be divided in the name of religious or ideological fervor.

Rita Dove

If we really want to be full and generous in spirit, we have no choice but to trust at some level.

Rita Dove

I prefer to explore the most intimate moments, the smaller, crystallized details we all hinge our lives on.

Rita Dove

What writing does is to reveal.

Rita Dove

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

Libraries are where it all begins.

Rita Dove

I grew up in Ohio, where civil-rights accomplishments had already begun to accelerate before Martin Luther King appeared. In hindsight, we know that many people, black and white, were instrumental in changing the Jim Crow status quo on all levels.

Rita Dove

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

Being true to yourself really means being true to all the complexities of the human spirit.

Rita Dove

I carry a notebook with me everywhere. But that's only the first step.

Rita Dove

I think one of the things that people tend to forget is that poets do write out of life. It isn't some set piece that then gets put up on the shelf, but that the impetus, the real instigation for poetry is everything that's happening around us.

Rita Dove

In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things.

Rita Dove

It really wasn't until I was in college when I began to write more and more, and I realized I was scheduling my entire life around my writing.

Rita Dove