Donald Hall famous quotes

04-25-2025

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

#Marriage #Together #How To Love
Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems.
-- Donald Hall

#Important #Done #Found
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
-- Donald Hall

#Writing #Two #Goal
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.
-- Donald Hall

#Years #Ignorant #Grandfather
Mere literary talent is common; what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.
-- Donald Hall

#Hard Work #Writing #Desire
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.
-- Donald Hall

#Real #Wish #Want
Today when I begin writing Iâ€™m aware: something that I donâ€™t understand drives this engine.
-- Donald Hall

#Writing #Today
But Blake's voices returned to dictate revisions.
-- Donald Hall

#Voice #Revision #Blake
Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.
-- Donald Hall

#Baseball #Football #Brother
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.
-- Donald Hall

#Baseball #Past #Glasses
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

#Powerful #Done #Denial
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

#Writing #Goal #Trying
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.
-- Donald Hall

#Dark #Opposites #Ideas
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.
-- Donald Hall

#Summer #Failure #Flower
Less is more, in prose as in architecture.
-- Donald Hall

#Art #Philosophy #History
I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.
-- Donald Hall

#Writing #Goal #Reason
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.
-- Donald Hall

#Baseball #Games #Suggestions
The form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.
-- Donald Hall

#Form #Verses #Liberating
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

#Men #Years #Shining
Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.
-- Donald Hall

#Character #Opposites #Anxious
I want to sleep like the birds then wake to write you again without hope that you read me.
-- Donald Hall

#Writing #Sleep #Bird
The greatest kindness would put a bullet in his bright eye.
-- Donald Hall

#Kindness #Eye #Crafts
I wish you were that birch rising from the clump behind you, and I the gray oak alongside.
-- Donald Hall

#Grief #Loss #Wish
The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.
-- Donald Hall

#Integrity #Reading #Pleasure
Your presence in this house is almost as painful and enormous as your absence.
-- Donald Hall

#Grief #Loss #House
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.
-- Donald Hall

#Writing #Light #Hands
You think that their dying is the worst thing that could happen. Then they stay dead.
-- Donald Hall

#Thinking #Dying #Worst
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.
-- Donald Hall

#Long #Notion

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