{"author":"Rita Dove","author_id":"Rita+Dove","total_quotes":29,"quotes":[{"text":"The First BookOpen it.Go ahead, it won't bite.Well. . . Maybe a little.More a nip, like. A tingle.It's pleasurable, really.You see, it keeps on opening.You may fall in.Sure, it's hard to get started;remember learning to useknife and fork? Dig in:you'll never reach bottom.It's not like it's the end of the world--just the world as you thinkyou know it.","author":"Rita Dove","tags":["books","learning","life","poetry","reading"],"id":236,"author_id":"Rita+Dove"},{"text":"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.","author":"Rita Dove","tags":["children","rita-dove"],"id":11725,"author_id":"Rita+Dove"},{"text":"Women invented misery, but we don't understand it.","author":"Rita Dove","tags":["life","misery","poetry","understanding","women"],"id":28820,"author_id":"Rita+Dove"},{"text":"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.","author":"Rita Dove","tags":["children","literature","you "],"id":65588,"author_id":"Rita+Dove"},{"text":"The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something.","author":"Rita Dove","tags":["clouds","me","feel "],"id":72317,"author_id":"Rita+Dove"},{"text":"From the time I began to read, as a child, I loved to feel their heft in my hand and the warm spot caused by their intimate weight in my lap; I loved the crisp whisper of a page turning, the musky odor of old paper and the sharp inky whiff of new pages. Leather bindings sent me into ecstasy. I even loved to gaze at a closed book and daydream about the possibilities inside.","author":"Rita Dove","tags":["poem","poetry","writing"],"id":74991,"author_id":"Rita+Dove"},{"text":"Equality and self-determination should never be divided in the name of religious or ideological fervor.","author":"Rita Dove","tags":["name","never","divided "],"id":120322,"author_id":"Rita+Dove"},{"text":"NexusI wrote stubbornly into the evening.At the window, a giant praying mantisrubbed his monkey wrench head against the glass,begging vacantly with pale eyes;and the commas leapt at me like wormsor miniature scythes blackened with age.The praying mantis screeched louder,his ragged jaws opening into formlessness.I walked outside;the grass hissed at my heels.Up ahead in the lapping darknesshe wobbled, magnified and absurdly green,a brontosaurus, a poet.","author":"Rita Dove","tags":["poetry"],"id":164241,"author_id":"Rita+Dove"},{"text":"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.","author":"Rita Dove","tags":["life","people","think "],"id":173430,"author_id":"Rita+Dove"},{"text":"I've never stopped wanting to cross the equator, or touch an. ","author":"Rita Dove","tags":["aging","desire","dreams","elderly","goals","life","living","poetry"],"id":175948,"author_id":"Rita+Dove"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":29,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}