Donald Hall Quotes: top 70 famous quotes about Donald Hall

Donald Hall Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational Donald Hall quotes, sayings and quotations 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. — Donald Hall

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. — Donald Hall

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

Less is more, in prose as in architecture. — Donald Hall

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

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. — Donald Hall

And every year, Ronald McDonald takes the Pulitzer. — Donald Hall

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. — Donald Hall

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

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

But Blake's voices returned to dictate revisions. — Donald Hall

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

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

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

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. — Donald Hall

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

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

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

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

Can build plane ... Delivery about three months. — Donald Hall

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

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

To grow old is to lose everything. — Donald Hall

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

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

Worship is not love. — Donald Hall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life is hell but death is worse.
- from No Deposit — Donald Hall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Donald Hall

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

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 — Donald Hall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — 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. — Donald Hall

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

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

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

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

For better or worse, poetry is my life. — Donald Hall

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. — 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. — Donald Hall

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. — Donald Hall

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. — Donald Hall

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

Everything important always begins from something trivial. — Donald Hall

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

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

I don't have a computer. I never have had one. — Donald Hall

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

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. — Donald Hall

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

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