Donald Hall Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

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

  Donald Hall

  Integrity, Reading, Pleasure

  Donald Hall (1982). “Claims for Poetry”, p.145, University of Michigan Press

  4 Copy quote

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

  Donald Hall

  Writing, Sleep, Bird

  Donald Hall (2007). “White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006”, p.365, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

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

  Donald Hall

  Writing, Goal, Reason

  Donald Hall (2004). “Breakfast Served Any Time All Day: Essays on Poetry New and Selected”, p.154, University of Michigan Press

  7 Copy quote

• To grow old is to lose everything.

  Donald Hall

  Grows, Loses

  Donald Hall (2003). “The Painted Bed: Poems”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

• 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!"

  Donald Hall

  Cheer, Greatness, Things Will Get Better

  Donald Hall (1988). “Poetry and ambition: essays, 1982-88”, Univ of Michigan Pr

  4 Copy quote

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

  Donald Hall

  Character, Opposites, Anxious

  5 Copy quote

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

  Donald Hall

  Kindness, Eye, Crafts

  8 Copy quote

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

  Donald Hall

  Sweet, Son, Decay

  Donald Hall (1990). “Old and New Poems”, p.19, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  7 Copy quote

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

  Donald Hall

  Grief, Loss, Wish

  Donald Hall (2007). “White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems, 1946-2006”, p.355, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

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

  Donald Hall

  Writing, Paper, Terrible

  4 Copy quote

• But Blake's voices returned to dictate revisions.

  Donald Hall

  Voice, Revision, Blake

  Donald Hall (2004). “Breakfast Served Any Time All Day: Essays on Poetry New and Selected”, p.33, University of Michigan Press

  4 Copy quote

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

  Donald Hall

  Form, Binding, Verses

  Donald Hall (2004). “Breakfast Served Any Time All Day: Essays on Poetry New and Selected”, p.34, University of Michigan Press

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Donald Hall

  Basketball, Football, Running

  4 Copy quote

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

  Donald Hall

  Horse, Glasses, Sea

  Donald Hall (1990). “Old and New Poems: Donald Hall”, p.163, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

• For a hundred and fifty years, in the pasture of dead horses,
  roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs,
  yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter
  frost heaved your bones in the ground--old toilers, soil makers:
  O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.

  Donald Hall

  Horse, Winter, Autumn

  Donald Hall (1990). “Old and New Poems: Donald Hall”, p.163, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Donald Hall (1990). “Old and New Poems”, p.109, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

• Can build plane... Delivery about three months.

  Donald Hall

  Three, Months, Aviation

  4 Copy quote

• 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, Flower, Failure

  Donald Hall (2012). “Life Work”, p.28, Beacon Press

  7 Copy quote

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