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Your presence in this house is almost as painful and enormous as your absence.
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
Absence
Presence
Enormous
Painful
Grief
Loss
Almost
House
More quotes by 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
I want to sleep like the birds then wake to write you again without hope that you read me.
Donald Hall
The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
Donald Hall
I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.
Donald Hall
I wish you were that birch rising from the clump behind you, and I the gray oak alongside.
Donald Hall
We learned how to love each other by loving together good things wholly outside each other.
Donald Hall
Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.
Donald Hall
Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible - and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.
Donald Hall
Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.
Donald Hall
The form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.
Donald Hall
Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.
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
