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

Donald Hall

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Donald Hall
Age: 89 †
Born: 1928
Born: September 20
Died: 2018
Died: June 23
Author
Critic
Poet
Writer
New Haven
Connecticut
Write
Without
Writing
Birds
Like
Wake
Bird
Sleep
Read
Hope

More quotes by Donald Hall

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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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Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible - and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.
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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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The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.
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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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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.
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Your presence in this house is almost as painful and enormous as your absence.
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Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.
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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!
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Mere literary talent is common what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.
Donald Hall
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I wish you were that birch rising from the clump behind you, and I the gray oak alongside.
Donald Hall
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Can build plane... Delivery about three months.
Donald Hall
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To grow old is to lose everything.
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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
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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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We learned how to love each other by loving together good things wholly outside each other.
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I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.
Donald Hall
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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.
Donald Hall
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Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.
Donald Hall
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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.
Donald Hall