Top 80 Rita Dove Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “My favorite poets may not be your bread and butter. I have more favorite poems than favorite poets.”

— Rita Dove

52. “My childhood library was small enough not to be intimidating. And yet I felt the whole world was contained in those two rooms. I could walk any aisle and smell wisdom.”

— Rita Dove

53. “I carry a notebook with me everywhere. But that’s only the first step.”

— Rita Dove

54. “I keep the drafts of each poem in color-coded folders. I pick up the folders according to how I feel about that color that day.”

— Rita Dove

55. “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!”

— Rita Dove

56. “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

57. “It makes me furious to hear haters of all skin colors – especially Christian, Jewish, and Muslim fundamentalists – deride other people because of their different beliefs and lifestyles.”

— Rita Dove

58. “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

59. “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

60. “For many years, I thought a poem was a whisper overheard, not an aria heard.”

— Rita Dove

61. “I loved to write when I was a child. I wrote, but I always thought it was something that you did as a child, then you put away childish things.”

— Rita Dove

62. “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

63. “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

64. “I didn’t know writers could be real live people, because I never knew any writers.”

— Rita Dove

65. “I believe people may have a predisposition for artistic creativity. It doesn’t mean they’re going to make it.”

— Rita Dove

66. “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!”

— Rita Dove

67. “Going to the library was the one place we got to go without asking for permission. And they let us choose what we wanted to read. It was a feeling of having a book be mine entirely.”

— Rita Dove

68. “People write me from all over the country, asking me, and sometimes even telling me, what they think a poet laureate should do. I found that immensely valuable.”

— Rita Dove

69. “Have you ever heard a good joke? If you’ve ever heard someone just right, with the right pacing, then you’re already on the way to poetry. It’s about using words in very precise ways and using gesture.”

— Rita Dove

70. “If they don’t read, if they don’t love reading; if they don’t find themselves compulsively reading, I don’t think they’re really a writer.”

— Rita Dove

71. “It’s the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.”

— Rita Dove

72. “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

73. “It’s unfortunate that sometimes in schools, there’s this need to have things quantified and graded.”

— Rita Dove

74. “There is not going to be any change unless we can begin to talk about any little fear, any little hatred, any little bias that we might have and to admit that all human beings have them.”

— Rita Dove

75. “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

76. “I always loved science. And in fact, I got a science award in high school. I mean, I loved science, but I think I loved literature more.”

— Rita Dove

77. “Rap is only one end of a whole spectrum of verbal play and virtuosity. Rap is geared for aural pleasure.”

— Rita Dove

78. “I think that you certainly don’t have to be aged and travel the world to write a poem.”

— Rita Dove

79. “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

80. “Being Poet Laureate made me realize I was capable of a larger voice. There is a more public utterance I can make as a poet.”

— Rita Dove

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

— Rita Dove

82. “I thought, after the Pulitzer, at least nothing will surprise me quite that much in my life. And another one happened. It was quite amazing.”

— Rita Dove

83. “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

84. “We wire the sky for comfort; we thread it through our lungs for a perfect fit. We’ve arranged this calm, though it is constantly unraveling. Where does it go then, atmosphere suckered up an invisible flue? How can we know where it goes?”

— Rita Dove

85. “The joy of working at something to find out what it means to me is what I grew up with.”

— Rita Dove

86. “Crassly put: When I write, I am trying not to bore myself and my readers.”

— Rita Dove

87. “Iedereen wil dat wonderkinderen mislukken. Dat maakt onze eigen middelmatigheid beter te verdragen.”

— Rita Dove