Donald Hall Quotes

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

To grow old is to lose everything.

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

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

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

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.

Less is more, in prose as in architecture.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Can build plane... Delivery about three months.

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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!"

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years; don't let them go, don't publish them until you have kept them around for ten years: by that time, they ought to stop moving on you; by that time, you ought to have them right.

But Blake's voices returned to dictate revisions.

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.

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.

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.

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