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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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Donald Hall
Age: 89 †
Born: 1928
Born: September 20
Died: 2018
Died: June 23
Author
Critic
Poet
Writer
New Haven
Connecticut
Write
Reason
Great
Writing
Life
Poems
Spend
Unless
Goal

More quotes by Donald Hall

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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
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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.
Donald Hall
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Your presence in this house is almost as painful and enormous as your absence.
Donald Hall
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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
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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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Can build plane... Delivery about three months.
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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I wish you were that birch rising from the clump behind you, and I the gray oak alongside.
Donald Hall
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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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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
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To grow old is to lose everything.
Donald Hall
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Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.
Donald Hall
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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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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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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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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
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Today when I begin writing I’m aware: something that I don’t understand drives this engine.
Donald Hall
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The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.
Donald Hall
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We learned how to love each other by loving together good things wholly outside each other.
Donald Hall
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Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible - and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.
Donald Hall