Donald Hall Quotes

Quotes about:

• We learned how to love each other by loving together
  good things wholly outside each other.

  Donald Hall

  Marriage, Together, How To Love

  Donald Hall (1997). “The Old Life”, p.92, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  47 Copy quote

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

  Donald Hall

  Thinking, Dying, Worst

  Donald Hall (2007). “White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006”, p.380, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  Donald Hall

  Eye, Sound, Ears

  13 Copy quote

• 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.

  Donald Hall

  Summer, Baseball, Father

  Donald Hall (2017). “Fathers Playing Catch with Sons: Essays on Sport (Mostly Baseball)”, p.53, North Point Press

  16 Copy quote

• 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

  Donald Hall (2012). “Life Work”, p.68, Beacon Press

  15 Copy quote

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

  Donald Hall

  Water, Streams, Seems

  DONALD HALL (1973). “WRITING WELL”

  6 Copy quote

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

  Donald Hall

  Hard Work, Writing, Desire

  17 Copy quote

• 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, Oil, June

  16 Copy quote

• 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

  Donald Hall (1994). “Death to the death of poetry: essays, reviews, notes, interviews”, Univ of Michigan Pr

  10 Copy quote

• 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, Happened

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Donald Hall (2015). “The Selected Poems of Donald Hall”, p.133, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  15 Copy quote

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

  Donald Hall

  Baseball, Football, Brother

  Donald Hall (2017). “Fathers Playing Catch with Sons: Essays on Sport (Mostly Baseball)”, p.35, North Point Press

  11 Copy quote

• Less is more, in prose as in architecture.

  Donald Hall

  Art, Philosophy, History

  DONALD HALL (1973). “WRITING WELL”

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Donald Hall (1988). “Poetry and Ambition: Essays 1982-1988”

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Donald Hall (2004). “Breakfast Served Any Time All Day: Essays on Poetry New and Selected”, p.50, University of Michigan Press

  10 Copy quote

• 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

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

  Donald Hall

  Baseball, Memories, America

  10 Copy quote

• 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.

  Donald Hall

  Hurt, Addiction, Important

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Donald Hall (2017). “Fathers Playing Catch with Sons: Essays on Sport (Mostly Baseball)”, p.59, North Point Press

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Donald Hall (2004). “Breakfast Served Any Time All Day: Essays on Poetry New and Selected”, p.155, University of Michigan Press

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  Donald Hall

  Moving, Home, Years

  Donald Hall (1988). “Poetry and Ambition: Essays 1982-1988”

  4 Copy quote

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

  Donald Hall

  Grief, Loss, House

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  6 Copy quote

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

  Donald Hall

  Writing, Today, Engines

  Donald Hall (1994). “Death to the death of poetry: essays, reviews, notes, interviews”, Univ of Michigan Pr

  4 Copy quote

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

  Donald Hall

  Together, Adjectives, Verbs

  DONALD HALL (1973). “WRITING WELL”

  4 Copy quote

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