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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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Donald Hall
Age: 89 †
Born: 1928
Born: September 20
Died: 2018
Died: June 23
Author
Critic
Poet
Writer
New Haven
Connecticut
Lived
Happened
Comes
Everything
Every
Long
Poem
Time
Notion
Absolutely

More quotes by 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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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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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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Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.
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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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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Today when I begin writing I’m aware: something that I don’t understand drives this engine.
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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Your presence in this house is almost as painful and enormous as your absence.
Donald Hall
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To grow old is to lose everything.
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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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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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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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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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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Mere literary talent is common what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.
Donald Hall
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Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.
Donald Hall