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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Donald Hall

Image
Your presence in this house is almost as painful and enormous as your absence.
Donald Hall
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I wish you were that birch rising from the clump behind you, and I the gray oak alongside.
Donald Hall
Image
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
Image
Mere literary talent is common what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.
Donald Hall
Image
I want to sleep like the birds then wake to write you again without hope that you read me.
Donald Hall
Image
I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.
Donald Hall
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.
Donald Hall
Image
We learned how to love each other by loving together good things wholly outside each other.
Donald Hall
Image
The form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.
Donald Hall
Image
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
Image
Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible - and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.
Donald Hall
Image
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
Image
The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.
Donald Hall
Image
Can build plane... Delivery about three months.
Donald Hall
Image
Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.
Donald Hall
Image
Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.
Donald Hall