Top 80 Rita Dove Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The library is an arena of possibility, opening both a window into the soul and a door onto the world.”

— Rita Dove

Featured in: Library Quotes

2. “Libraries are where it all begins.”

— Rita Dove

3. “Creative writing and literacy go hand and hand.”

— Rita Dove

4. “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

5. “Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”

— Rita Dove

6. “We should always do something that makes us feel like a child again. Keep learning, no matter what it is.”

— Rita Dove

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

— Rita Dove

8. “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

9. “If you can’t be free, be a mystery.”

— Rita Dove

10. “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

11. “Everybody who’s anybody longs to be a tree.”

— Rita Dove

12. “Poetry connects you to yourself, to the self that doesn’t know how to talk or negotiate.”

— Rita Dove

13. “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

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

— Rita Dove

15. “Don’t be so fast, you’re all you’ve got.”

— Rita Dove

16. “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

17. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

18. “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

19. “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

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

— Rita Dove

21. “I wish someone had told me that my stories are really mine to tell. In other words, anything that I think is important or that has moved me has the ability to move somebody else.”

— Rita Dove

22. “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

23. “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

24. “If we’re going to solve the problems of the world, we have to learn how to talk to one another. Poetry is the language at its essence. It’s the bones and the skeleton of the language. It teaches you, if nothing else, how to choose your words.”

— Rita Dove

25. “If our children are unable to voice what they mean, no one will know how they feel. If they can’t imagine a different world, they are stumbling through a darkness made all the more sinister by its lack of reference points. For a young person growing up in America’s alienated neighborhoods, there can be no greater empowerment than to dare to speak from the heart – and then to discover that one is not alone in ones feelings.”

— Rita Dove

26. “I’ve always been intrigued by the way history works, the way we decide what is mentioned.”

— Rita Dove

27. “Under adversity, under oppression, the words begin to fail, the easy words begin to fail. In order to convey things accurately, the human being is almost forced to find the most precise words possible, which is a precondition for literature.”

— Rita Dove

28. “I think children have talent and insight, but it gets beaten out of them.”

— Rita Dove

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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

32. “I write short stories, and I wrote a play.”

— Rita Dove

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

33. “What writing does is to reveal.”

— Rita Dove

34. “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

35. “To practice your scales, so to speak, in order play the symphony, is what you have to do as a young poet.”

— Rita Dove

36. “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

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

— Rita Dove

38. “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

39. “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

40. “A good poem is like a bouillon cube. It’s concentrated and it nourishes you when you need it.”

— Rita Dove

41. “When I was young, I was older than I am today.”

— Rita Dove

42. “The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I’ve seen ecstasy or something.”

— Rita Dove

43. “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

44. “When we are touched by something it’s as if we’re being brushed by an angel’s wings.”

— Rita Dove

45. “What’s a word, a talisman, to hold against the world?”

— Rita Dove

46. “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

47. “I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.”

— Rita Dove

48. “There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry.”

— Rita Dove

Featured in: Reading Quotes

49. “I think if you put something in a file that says “war poems” or “love poems” that you already restrict the way in which the poem might move.”

— Rita Dove

50. “In fact, sometimes traveling the world is a way of not writing a poem, but it’s the quality of experience. It’s being able to experience something and when you begin to write about it be able to apply the tools that you need for writing.”

— Rita Dove