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
Somebody
Measure
Dimes
Liberty
Miss
Torch
Stop
Basketball
Torches
Maybe
Court
Yard
Four
Missing
Yards
Face
Football
Ninety
Sprints
Faces
Nobody
Runs
Sprint
Running
Feet
Forty
Dime

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The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.
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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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I wish you were that birch rising from the clump behind you, and I the gray oak alongside.
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Mere literary talent is common what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.
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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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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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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.
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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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Can build plane... Delivery about three months.
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Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.
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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.
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Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.
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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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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.
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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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Your presence in this house is almost as painful and enormous as your absence.
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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.
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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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To grow old is to lose everything.
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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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