Rita Dove

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

I've always been intrigued by the way history works, the way we decide what is mentioned.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm a night person. My best times are midnight to six, actually.

I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age.

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.