Donald Hall Quotes

27 Sourced Quotes

Writing prose for a living—freelance writing—does another thing I like: it opens doors.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Donald Hall
There are the women whose husbands I meet on aeroplanes
Who close their briefcases and ask, 'What are you in?'
I look in their eyes, I tell them I am in poetry….

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

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

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

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

Donald Hall