Donald Hall Quotes - Page 2

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

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

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

To grow old is to lose everything.

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!"

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

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

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

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

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

But Blake's voices returned to dictate revisions.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Can build plane... Delivery about three months.

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.