Donald Hall Quotes
Top 70 wise famous quotes and sayings 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.
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.
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.
Every afternoon, I shut the door of my bedroom to write: Poetry was secret, dangerous, wicked and delicious.
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.
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.
In December of 1952, my first wife, Kirby, and I left Vienna to drive through the Russian sector of Austria into Yugoslavia.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Baseball, because of its continuity over the space of America and the time of America, is a place where memory gathers.
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.
Sound had always been my portal to poetry, but in the beginning, sound was imagined through the eye.
Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible - and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.