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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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Donald Hall
Age: 89 †
Born: 1928
Born: September 20
Died: 2018
Died: June 23
Author
Critic
Poet
Writer
New Haven
Connecticut
Trying
Way
Likely
Good
Poetry
Goal
Write
Best
Great
Writing

More quotes by 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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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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Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.
Donald Hall
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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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Today when I begin writing I’m aware: something that I don’t understand drives this engine.
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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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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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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To grow old is to lose everything.
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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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
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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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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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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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Can build plane... Delivery about three months.
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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Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.
Donald Hall