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"Libraries are where it all begins."
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"Chekhov was capable of casually tossing off deplorable comments in his letters, combined with a very modern anger against anti-Semitism."
"The magic and the danger of fiction is this: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, and cry for people who do not, outside of the story, exist. There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong."
"I love stories that suck you in, that you can't stop reading because you are quite simply there."
"It was pretty silly quoting poetry around free and easy like that. It was the act of a silly damn snob. Give man a few lines of verse and he thinks he's the Lord of all Creation. You think you can walk on water with all your books. Well, the world can get by just fine without them."
"Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. Though I've never led an army, I am a wanderer. I cradle 'The Odyssey' nights while the moon is waning, as if it were the sweet body of a woman."
"For several years, while I searched for, found, and studied black women writers, I deliberately shut O'Connor out, feeling almost ashamed that she had reached me first. And yet, even when I no longer read her, I missed her, and realized that though the rest of America might not mind, having endured it so long, I would never be satisfied with a segregated literature. I would have to read Zora Hurston and Flannery O'Connor, Nella Larsen and Carson McCullers, Jean Toomer and William Faulkner, before I could begin to feel well read at all."
"In reading we have to allow the sunken meanings to remain sunken, suggested, not stated; lapsing and flowing into each other like reeds on the bed of a river."
"And please, stay away from those books you devour. They are putting the most fantastical tales into your head."
"Yet who reads to bring about an end, however desirable? Are there not some pursuits that we practise because they are good in themselves, and some pleasures that are final? And is not this among them? I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards, their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble, the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, "Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading."
Explore more quotes by Rita Dove
"I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age."
"I believe people may have a predisposition for artistic creativity. It doesn't mean they're going to make it."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something."
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