Donald Hall Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

If our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

I don't know where a poem comes from until after I've lived with it a long time. I've a notion that a poem comes from absolutely everything that every happened to you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can build plane... Delivery about three months.

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

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

To grow old is to lose everything.

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

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

But Blake's voices returned to dictate revisions.

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

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.

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

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.

Less is more, in prose as in architecture.

After a couple of years of public high school, I went to Exeter - an insane conglomeration of adolescent males in the wilderness, all of whom claimed to hate poetry.

As Henry Moore carvedor modelled his sculpture every day, he strove to surpass Donatello4. and failed, but woke the next morningelated for another try.

Worship is not love.

One day, of course, no one will remember what I remember.

My parents were willing to let me follow my nose, do what I wanted to do, and they supported my interest by buying the books that I wanted for birthdays and Christmas, almost always poetry books.

Even famous poets such as Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams were rarely asked to read their poems.

Not everything in old age is grim. I haven't walked through an airport for years, and wheelchairs are the way to travel.

Everything important always begins from something trivial.

As I grew older - collapsing into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into eighty-five - poetry abandoned me.

I've always felt that poetry was particularly erotic, more than prose was... I say that you read poems not with your eyes and not with your ears, but with your mouth. You taste it.

For better or worse, poetry is my life.

Sound had always been my portal to poetry, but in the beginning, sound was imagined through the eye.

In my life, I've seen enormous increase in the consumption of poetry. When I was young, there were virtually no poetry readings.

I was at Harvard with a whole bunch of poets, and that was very rare. They published a lot of books because there was an excitement after the war that translated into poetry.

When it comes to poetry, I think partly the numbers of people attempting to write poems is probably a result or the reaction to technology.

Every afternoon, I shut the door of my bedroom to write: Poetry was secret, dangerous, wicked and delicious.