Donald Hall Quotes
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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.
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Less is more, in prose as in architecture.
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When we put words together - adjective with noun, noun with verb, verb with object - we start to talk to each other.
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Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.
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Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.
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The greatest kindness would put a bullet in his bright eye.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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We learned how to love each other by loving together good things wholly outside each other.
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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.
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Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.
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Baseball, because of its continuity over the space of America and the time of America, is a place where memory gathers.
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But Blake's voices returned to dictate revisions.
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The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.
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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.
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The form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.
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Sweet death, small son, our instrument Of immortality, Your cries and hungers document Our bodily decay.
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Today when I begin writing I’m aware: something that I don’t understand drives this engine.
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Can build plane... Delivery about three months.
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Mere literary talent is common; what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.
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I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.
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You think that their dying is the worst thing that could happen. Then they stay dead.
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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.
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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
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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.
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Your presence in this house is almost as painful and enormous as your absence.
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To grow old is to lose everything.
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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.
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Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems.
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