Top 110 Quotes & Sayings by Donald Hall - Page 2

I don't publish anything I haven't worked over 100 times.

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.

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

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

I expect my immortality will last about six seconds after my funeral.

By 1968, I had lived 10 years in Michigan. Gradually, I had come to love watching Detroit's baseball club in its small, beautiful, antiquated Tiger Stadium - a baseball park as fine as Fenway Park or Wrigley Field, though it never got the adulatory press.

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.

If work is no antidote to death, nor a denial of it, death is a powerful stimulus to work. Get done what you can.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Can build plane... Delivery about three months.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Less is more, in prose as in architecture.

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

To grow old is to lose everything.

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

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

But Blake's voices returned to dictate revisions.

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.

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!"

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

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

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.