Best 49 quotes of Donald Hall on MyQuotes

Donald Hall

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    Donald Hall

    Baseball, because of its continuity over the space of America and the time of America, is a place where memory gathers.

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    Donald Hall

    Baseball is continuous, like nothing else among American things, an endless game of repeated summers, joining the long generations of all the fathers and all the sons.

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    Donald Hall

    Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.

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    Donald Hall

    But Blake's voices returned to dictate revisions.

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    Donald Hall

    Can build plane... Delivery about three months.

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    Donald Hall

    Each year the big garden grew smaller and Jane - who grew flowers by choice, not corn or stringbeans - worked at the vegetables more than I did. Each winter I dreamed crops, dreamed marvels of canning . . . and each summer I largely failed. Shamefaced, I planted no garden at all.

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    Donald Hall

    Every now and then I meet someone certain of personal greatness. I want to pat this person on the shoulder and mutter comforting words: "Things will get better! You won't always feel so depressed! Cheer up!

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    Donald Hall

    For a hundred and fifty years, in the pasture of dead horses, roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs, yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter frost heaved your bones in the ground--old toilers, soil makers: O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.

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    Donald Hall

    For most baseball fans, maybe oldest is always best. We love baseball because it seizes and retains the past, like the snowy village inside a glass paperweight.

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    Donald Hall

    Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.

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    Donald Hall

    Great literature, if we read it well, opens us up to the world and makes us more sensitive to it, as if we acquired eyes that could see through things and ears that could hear smaller sounds.

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    Donald Hall

    If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn't wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.

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    Donald Hall

    If work is no antidote to death, nor a denial of it, death is a powerful stimulus to work. Get done what you can.

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    Donald Hall

    In football they measure forty-yard sprints. Nobody runs forty yards in basketball. Maybe you run the ninety-four feet of the court; then you stop, not on a dime, but on Miss Liberty's torch. In football you run over somebody's face.

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    Donald Hall

    I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.

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    Donald Hall

    I want to sleep like the birds then wake to write you again without hope that you read me.

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    Donald Hall

    I wish you were that birch rising from the clump behind you, and I the gray oak alongside.

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    Donald Hall

    Joe DiMaggio batting sometimes gave the impression, the suggestion that the old rules and dimensions of baseball no longer applied to him, and that the game had at last grown unfairly easy.

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    Donald Hall

    Less is more, in prose as in architecture.

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    Donald Hall

    Mere literary talent is common; what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.

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    Donald Hall

    Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible - and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.

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    Donald Hall

    Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.

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    Donald Hall

    Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems.

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    Donald Hall

    Some of us are darkness lovers. We do not dislike the early and late daylight of June, but we cherish the increasing dark of November, which we wrap around ourselves in the prosperous warmth of wood stove, oil and electric blanket. Inside our warmth we fold ourselves, partly tuber, partly bear, in the dark and its cold - around us, outside us, safely away from us. We tuck ourselves up in the comfort of cold's opposite, warming ourslves by thought of the cold, lighting ourselves by darkness's idea.

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    Donald Hall

    Sweet death, small son, our instrument Of immortality, Your cries and hungers document Our bodily decay.

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    Donald Hall

    The form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.

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    Donald Hall

    The greatest kindness would put a bullet in his bright eye.

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    Donald Hall

    The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.

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    Donald Hall

    Today when I begin writing I’m aware: something that I don’t understand drives this engine.

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    Donald Hall

    To desire to write poems that endure-we undertake such a goal certain of two things: that in all likelihood we will fail, and if we succeed we will never know it

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    Donald Hall

    To grow old is to lose everything. Aging, everybody knows it. Even when we are young, we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads when a grandfather dies. Then we row for years on the midsummer pond, ignorant and content.

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    Donald Hall

    Virtually every beginning poet hurts himself by an addiction to adjectives. Verbs are by far the most important things for poems-especially wonderful tough monosyllables like "gasp" and "cry." Nouns are the next most important. Adjectives tend to be useless.

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    Donald Hall

    We learned how to love each other by loving together good things wholly outside each other.

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    Donald Hall

    We made in those days tiny identical rooms inside our bodies which the men who uncover our graves will find in a thousand years shining and whole.

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    Donald Hall

    When we put words together - adjective with noun, noun with verb, verb with object - we start to talk to each other.

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    Donald Hall

    Words seem like drops of water in a stream that has its own wholeness and its own motion.

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    Donald Hall

    Work is style, and there is style without thought; not in theory, only in fact. When I take a sentence in my hand, raise it to the light, rub my hand across it, disjoin it, put it back together again with a comma added, raising the pitch in the front part; when I rub the grain of it, comb the fur of it, re-assemble the bones of it, I am making something that carries with it the sound of a voice, the firmness of a hand. Maybe little more.

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    Donald Hall

    You know how, when you fly from coast to coast on a really clear day, looking down from many miles up, you can see the little baseball diamonds everywhere? And every time I see a baseball diamond my heart goes out to it. And I think somewhere down there- I don't see any houses, I can hardly see any roads- but I know that people down there are playing the game we all love.

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    Donald Hall

    Your presence in this house is almost as painful and enormous as your absence.

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    Donald Hall

    You think that their dying is the worst thing that could happen. Then they stay dead.

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    Donald Hall

    Are you past pity? If you have consciousness now, if I something I can call "you" has something like "consciousness," I doubt you remember the last days. I play them over and over: I lift your wasted body onto the commode, your arms looped around my neck, aiming your bony bottom so that it will not bruise on a rail. Faintly you repeat, "Momma, Momma.

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    Donald Hall

    As Henry Moore carved or modelled his sculpture every day, he strove to surpass Donatello 4. and failed, but woke the next morning elated for another try.

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    Donald Hall

    Chipmunks jump, and greensnakes slither. Rather burst than not be with her. Bluebirds fight, but bears are stronger. We've got fifty years or longer. Hoptoads hop, but hogs are fatter. Nothing else but Us can matter.

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    Donald Hall

    In 2013 there were 7,427 poetry readings in April, many on a Thursday. For anyone born in 1928 who pays attention to poetry, the numerousness is astonishing. In April 1948, there were 15 readings in the United States, 12 by Robert Frost. So I claim. The figures are imaginary, but you get the point.

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    Donald Hall

    It's almost relaxing to know I'll die fairly soon, as it's a comfort not to obsess about my next orgasm.

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    Donald Hall

    Now and then, especially at night, solitude loses its soft power and loneliness takes over. I am grateful when solitude returns.

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    Donald Hall

    [O]ver the years I travelled to another universe. However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying--in the supermarket, these old ladies won't get out of my way--but most important they are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial. If we forget for a moment that we are old, we are reminded when we try to stand up, or when we encounter someone young, who appears to observe green skin, extra heads, and protuberances.

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    Donald Hall

    Worship is not love.

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    Donald Hall

    Your presence in this house is almost as enormous and painful as your absence.