Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When we are touched by something it's as if we're being brushed by an angel's wings. "

" 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. "

" What writing does is to reveal. "

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

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

" 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. "

Black And White

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

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

" 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. "

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

" Libraries are where it all begins. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" It's the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" As an African-American, as a woman, I think that I've been sensitized to the way in which history privileges the white male and the way in which certain aspects of history, the things that we are taught in school, the things that are handed down, never, never entered the picture though they might have been very important. "

" 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. "

" 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! "

" I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding. "

" I think reading Shakespeare's plays when I was young was extremely important. He had the ability to make utter strangers come alive. "

" 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. "

" 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. "