Donald Hall Quotes & Sayings

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

Prose is not so dependent on sound. The line of poetry, with the breaking of the line - to me, sound is the kind of doorway into poetry. And my sense of sound, or my ability to control it, lapsed or grew less. — Donald Hall

My problem isn't death but old age. I fret about my lack of balance, my buckling knee, my difficulty standing up and sitting down. — Donald Hall

Nothing I do will make death disappear
Or let your shudder or your knowledge go.
See the world whole, and see it clearly then,
A globe of dirt crusted with bones of men.
If we walk, we walk on graves.
- from Shudder — Donald Hall

When I was 12, I had a fondness for horror movies like the 'Wolfman.' The boy next door said I should read Poe. — Donald Hall

It used to be that phrases and lines would come into my head, often many of them in a period of five days or a week, and maybe I didn't know what I was talking about, but the words had a kind of heaviness or deliciousness to them. — 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

Obviously, death is ahead of me. I don't look forward to dying one little bit. But, you know, I simply don't worry about it because it's going to happen to me as it does to anybody. — Donald Hall

For better or worse, poetry is my life. — Donald Hall

In 1952, I recited aloud for the first time, booming in Oxford's Sheldonian Theatre from a bad poem that had won a prize. I was twenty-three. — Donald Hall

And every year, Ronald McDonald takes the Pulitzer. — Donald Hall

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

Safe Sex
If he and she do not know each other, and feel confident
they will not meet again; if he avoids affectionate words;
if she has grown insensible skin under skin; if they desire
only the tribute of another's cry; if they employ each other
as revenge on old lovers or families of entitlement and steel
then there will be no betrayals, no letters returned unread,
no frenzy, no hurled words of permanent humiliation,
no trembling days, no vomit at midnight, no repeated
apparition of a body floating face-down at the pond's edge — Donald Hall

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

Many years, I would publish four books - an anthology, a book of criticism, a new book of poems, a book of essays. — Donald Hall

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

In 2013 there were 7,427 poetry readings in April, many on a Thursday. For anyone born in 1928 who pays attention to poetry, the numerousness is astonishing. In April 1948, there were 15 readings in the United States, 12 by Robert Frost. So I claim. The figures are imaginary, but you get the point. — Donald Hall

Poetry offers works of art that are beautiful, like paintings, which are my second favorite work of the art, but there are also works of art that embody emotion and that are kind of school for feeling. They teach how to feel, and they do this by the means of their beauty of language. — Donald Hall

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

There's a great deal of stripping away; in early drafts, I may say the same thing two or three times, and each may be appropriate, but I try to pick the best and improve it. I work on sound a great deal, and I will change a word or two, revise punctuation and line breaks, looking for the sound I want. — Donald Hall

When I lived summers at my grandparents' farm, haying with my grandfather from 1938 to 1945, my dear grandmother Kate cooked abominably. For noon dinners, we might eat three days of fricasseed chicken from a setting hen that had boiled twelve hours. — Donald Hall

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

I write longhand; I make changes longhand, and I have an assistant who types it up. She lives 70 yards away. Every afternoon, I have a case I leave out on the porch, and she brings it back the next morning. — Donald Hall

We die of habits,
deplorable ones
like merely living:
finally fatal.
- from Tubes — Donald Hall

It's almost relaxing to know I'll die fairly soon, as it's a comfort not to obsess about my next orgasm. — Donald Hall

Both my New Hampshire great-grandfathers wore facial hair: the Copperhead who fought in the war and the sheep farmer too old for combat. — Donald Hall

Love is like sounds, whose last reverberations / Hang on the leaves of strange trees, on mountains / As distant as the curving of the earth, / Where the snow hangs still in the middle of the air.
-from Love is Like Sounds — Donald Hall

A fellowship to Oxford acquainted me with the depths of English cooking. By the twenty-first century, London's best restaurants are as good as Paris's, but not in the 1950s. — Donald Hall

We are all dying
of something, always,
but our degrees of
awareness differ
- from Tubes — Donald Hall

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

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

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

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

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

Although I was paid a salary in Ann Arbor, my wife and children and I drank powdered milk at six cents a quart instead of the stuff that came in bottles. I was a tightwad. — Donald Hall

As Henry Moore carved
or modelled his sculpture every day,
he strove to surpass Donatello
4. and failed, but woke the next morning
elated for another try. — Donald Hall

There are books all around me ... I don't read as much as I used to, but I always have a book or two going. — Donald Hall

I would work until I got stuck, and I would put it down and pick up something else. I might be able to take a 20-minute nap and get to work again. That way, I was able to work about 10 hours a day ... It was important to me to work every day. I managed to work on Christmas day, just to be able to say I worked 365 days a year. — Donald Hall

I think my very best work came out when I was about 60, not when I was 20. I was publishing all the time when I was in my 20s, and some of those poems I still like. And there were a few after 60, and in my 70s, that I like. But they became fewer and fewer. — 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

I've had someone, my assistant, type for me. I've done it that way for more than 50 years because I type with one finger, although quite rapidly. — Donald Hall

New poems no longer come to me with their prodigies of metaphor and assonance. Prose endures. I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is, on the whole, preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two. — 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

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

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

When I was nineteen,
I told a thirty-
year-old man what a
fool I had been when
I was seventeen.
'We were always,' he
said glancing down, 'a
fool two years ago. — Donald Hall

In my life, I've seen enormous increase in the consumption of poetry. When I was young, there were virtually no poetry readings. — Donald Hall

Exiled by death from people we have known,
We are reduced again by years, and try
To call them back and clothe the barren bone,
Not to admit that people ever die.
-from Exile — 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

Ox Cart Man

In October of the year,
he counts potatoes dug from the brown field,
counting the seed, counting
the cellar's portion out,
and bags the rest on the cart's floor.

He packs wool sheared in April, honey
in combs, linen, leather
tanned from deerhide,
and vinegar in a barrel
hoped by hand at the forge's fire.

He walks by his ox's head, ten days
to Portsmouth Market, and sells potatoes,
and the bag that carried potatoes,
flaxseed, birch brooms, maple sugar, goose
feathers, yarn.

When the cart is empty he sells the cart.
When the cart is sold he sells the ox,
harness and yoke, and walks
home, his pockets heavy
with the year's coin for salt and taxes,

and at home by fire's light in November cold
stitches new harness
for next year's ox in the barn,
and carves the yoke, and saws planks
building the cart again. — Donald Hall

Can build plane ... Delivery about three months. — Donald Hall

My parents were willing to let me follow my nose, do what I wanted to do, and they supported my interest by buying the books that I wanted for birthdays and Christmas, almost always poetry books. — Donald Hall

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

I have to do draft after draft ... It takes me a long time, but I love doing it, and I have to do it every day, or I feel slack. — Donald Hall

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

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. — Donald Hall

I'd heard of writers who say they hate to write. Not me. I love to do it. — Donald Hall

IT IS SENSIBLE of me to be aware that I will die one of these days. I will not pass away. Every day millions of people pass away - in obituaries, death notices, cards of consolation, e-mails to the corpse's friends - but people don't die. Sometimes they rest in peace, quit this world, go the way of all flesh, depart, give up the ghost, breathe a last breath, join their dear ones in heaven, meet their Maker, ascend to a better place, succumb surrounded by family, return to the Lord, go home, cross over, or leave this world. Whatever the fatuous phrase, death usually happens peacefully (asleep) or after a courageous struggle (cancer). Sometimes women lose their husbands. (Where the hell did I put him?) Some expressions are less common in print: push up the daisies, kick the bucket, croak, buy the farm, cash out. All euphemisms conceal how we gasp and choke turning blue. — Donald Hall

Chipmunks jump, and
greensnakes slither.
Rather burst than
not be with her.
Bluebirds fight, but
bears are stronger.
We've got fifty
years or longer.
Hoptoads hop, but
hogs are fatter.
Nothing else but
Us can matter. — Donald Hall

Every afternoon, I shut the door of my bedroom to write: Poetry was secret, dangerous, wicked and delicious. — Donald Hall

When I finished my initial year at Oxford, I flew home to marry Kirby, who had been my girlfriend in college. We had met on a blind date. — Donald Hall

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

Each season, my balance gets worse, and sometimes I fall. I no longer cook for myself but microwave widower food, mostly Stouffer's. My fingers are clumsy and slow with buttons. — Donald Hall

It used to be that one poet in each generation performed poems in public. In the twenties, it was Vachel Lindsay, who sometimes dropped to his knees in the middle of a poem. Then Robert Frost took over, and made his living largely on the road. — Donald Hall

When I was a child, I loved old people. My New Hampshire grandfather was my model human being. — Donald Hall

On September twentieth every year, I got to choose my menu - meatloaf, corn niblets, and rice were followed by candles on chocolate cake with vanilla icing and a scoop of Brock-Hall ice cream. — Donald Hall

Not everything in old age is grim. I haven't walked through an airport for years, and wheelchairs are the way to travel. — 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

Friends die, friends become demented, friends quarrel, friends drift with old age into silence. — Donald Hall

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

When it comes to poetry, I think partly the numbers of people attempting to write poems is probably a result or the reaction to technology. — Donald Hall

Even famous poets such as Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams were rarely asked to read their poems. — Donald Hall

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

In 1975, I quit my tenure, and we moved from Ann Arbor to New Hampshire. It was daunting to pay for groceries and the mortgage by freelance writing - but it worked, and I loved doing it. — 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

However alert we are, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. — Donald Hall

In December of 1952, my first wife, Kirby, and I left Vienna to drive through the Russian sector of Austria into Yugoslavia. — Donald Hall

Sound had always been my portal to poetry, but in the beginning, sound was imagined through the eye. — Donald Hall

I'm happy to feed the squirrels - tree rats with the agility of point guards - but in fair weather, they frighten my finches. They leap from snowbank to porch to feeder and stuff their cheek pouches with chickadee feed. — Donald Hall

But Blake's voices returned to dictate revisions. — Donald Hall

I felt the need to be more open and expressive of my feelings, not just about the hills and the countryside, but about the daily life. — Donald Hall

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

As I grew older - collapsing into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into eighty-five - poetry abandoned me. — Donald Hall

Less is more, in prose as in architecture. — Donald Hall

One day, of course, no one will remember what I remember. — 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

As I look at the barn in my ninth decade, I see the no-smoking sign, rusted and tilting on the unpainted gray clapboard. My grandfather, born in 1875, milked his cattle there a century ago. — Donald Hall

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

Contentment is work so engrossing that you do not know that you are working. — 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

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

Everything important always begins from something trivial. — Donald Hall

I read poems for the pleasure of the mouth. My heart is in my mouth, and the sound of poetry is the way in." ~from an interview in Narrative magazine — Donald Hall

One Oxford poet confessed to me that I had been scary because I talked American and wore tennis shoes. — Donald Hall

I loathe the trivialization of poetry that happens in creative writing classes. Teachers set exercises to stimulate subject matter: Write a poem about an imaginary landscape with real people in it. Write about a place your parents lived in before you were born. We have enough terrible poetry around without encouraging more of it. — Donald Hall

I have seen so many poets who were famous, who won all sorts of prizes, disappear with their death. I write as good as I can and don't try to turn that into some hope for a future that I could never know. — 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

[O]ver the years I travelled to another universe. However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying
in the supermarket, these old ladies won't get out of my way
but most important they are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial. If we forget for a moment that we are old, we are reminded when we try to stand up, or when we encounter someone young, who appears to observe green skin, extra heads, and protuberances. — Donald Hall