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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
Great
Writing
Life
Poems
Spend
Unless
Goal
Write
Reason

More quotes by 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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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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Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible - and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.
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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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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The form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.
Donald Hall
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To grow old is to lose everything.
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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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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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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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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Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.
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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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
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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.
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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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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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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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