Donald Hall quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Donald Hall

Donald Hall Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Donald Hall on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

When I finished my initial year at Oxford, I flew home to marry Kirby, who had been my girlfriend in college. We had met on a blind date.

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

Less is more, in prose as in architecture.

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

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.

And every year, Ronald McDonald takes the Pulitzer.

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.

I'd heard of writers who say they hate to write. Not me. I love to do it.

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

But Blake's voices returned to dictate revisions.

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

Many times I have written something, and after it was published, I understood what I was saying.

We die of habits,
deplorable ones
like merely living:
finally fatal.
- from Tubes

I have to do draft after draft ... It takes me a long time, but I love doing it, and I have to do it every day, or I feel slack.

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

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

Contentment is work so engrossing that you do not know that you are working.

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.

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

Can build plane ... Delivery about three months.

In December of 1952, my first wife, Kirby, and I left Vienna to drive through the Russian sector of Austria into Yugoslavia.

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

To grow old is to lose everything.

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

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

Worship is not love.

Some days I feel good about my work, and sometimes I feel I've never written anything worthwhile. That's par for the course.

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

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

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

Divorce was miserable, as it always is, and we divorce for the same reasons we marry.

I don't publish anything I haven't worked over 100 times.

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

Life is hell but death is worse.
- from No Deposit

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

I watch a white landscape that turns pale green, dark green, yellow and red, brown under bare branches, until snow falls again.

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

One Oxford poet confessed to me that I had been scary because I talked American and wore tennis shoes.

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

Both my New Hampshire great-grandfathers wore facial hair: the Copperhead who fought in the war and the sheep farmer too old for combat.

I felt the need to be more open and expressive of my feelings, not just about the hills and the countryside, but about the daily life.

When I was 12, I had a fondness for horror movies like the 'Wolfman.' The boy next door said I should read Poe.

I read poems for the pleasure of the mouth. My heart is in my mouth, and the sound of poetry is the way in." ~from an interview in Narrative magazine

When I was a child, I loved old people. My New Hampshire grandfather was my model human being.

I expect my immortality will last about six seconds after my funeral.

I really feel better about aging at the age of 86 than I did at 70.

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

Many years, I would publish four books - an anthology, a book of criticism, a new book of poems, a book of essays.

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

I've had someone, my assistant, type for me. I've done it that way for more than 50 years because I type with one finger, although quite rapidly.

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

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

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

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

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

For better or worse, poetry is my life.

In 1952, I recited aloud for the first time, booming in Oxford's Sheldonian Theatre from a bad poem that had won a prize. I was twenty-three.

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

In anything you write - in a short story, a poem - there has to be a counter-motion; it can't go all in one direction.

There are books all around me ... I don't read as much as I used to, but I always have a book or two going.

We are all dying
of something, always,
but our degrees of
awareness differ
- from Tubes

Everything important always begins from something trivial.

Friends die, friends become demented, friends quarrel, friends drift with old age into silence.

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

I don't have a computer. I never have had one.

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

My problem isn't death but old age. I fret about my lack of balance, my buckling knee, my difficulty standing up and sitting down.

However alert we are, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy.

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