Quote

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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Donald Hall
Age: 89 †
Born: 1928
Born: September 20
Died: 2018
Died: June 23
Author
Critic
Poet
Writer
New Haven
Connecticut
Four
Missing
Yards
Face
Football
Ninety
Sprints
Faces
Nobody
Runs
Sprint
Running
Feet
Forty
Dime
Somebody
Measure
Dimes
Liberty
Miss
Torch
Stop
Basketball
Torches
Maybe
Court
Yard

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Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.
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Your presence in this house is almost as painful and enormous as your absence.
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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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Baseball, because of its continuity over the space of America and the time of America, is a place where memory gathers.
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I wish you were that birch rising from the clump behind you, and I the gray oak alongside.
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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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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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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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I want to sleep like the birds then wake to write you again without hope that you read me.
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Can build plane... Delivery about three months.
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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.
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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!
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Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.
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Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.
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To grow old is to lose everything.
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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.
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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.
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The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.
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The form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.
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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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