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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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Donald Hall
Age: 89 †
Born: 1928
Born: September 20
Died: 2018
Died: June 23
Author
Critic
Poet
Writer
New Haven
Connecticut
Years
Poet
Horace
Time
Ought
Recommended
Stop
Publish
Moving
Poems
Keep
Poets
Around
Kept
Home
Wrote
Right
Ten

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We learned how to love each other by loving together good things wholly outside each other.
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Can build plane... Delivery about three months.
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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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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.
Donald Hall
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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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The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.
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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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Your presence in this house is almost as painful and enormous as your absence.
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Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.
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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Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible - and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.
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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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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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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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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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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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Mere literary talent is common what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.
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