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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
House
Absence
Presence
Enormous
Painful
Grief
Loss
Almost

More quotes by Donald Hall

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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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We learned how to love each other by loving together good things wholly outside each other.
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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.
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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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Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible - and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.
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To grow old is to lose everything.
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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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The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.
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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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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
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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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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
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Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.
Donald Hall
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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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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.
Donald Hall
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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.
Donald Hall
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Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.
Donald Hall
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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.
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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!
Donald Hall