Quote

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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Donald Hall
Age: 89 †
Born: 1928
Born: September 20
Died: 2018
Died: June 23
Author
Critic
Poet
Writer
New Haven
Connecticut
Things
Certain
Shoulder
Persons
Cheer
Person
Shoulders
Better
Greatness
Feel
Meet
Feels
Personal
Mutter
Every
Words
Comforting
Always
Someone
Depressed

More quotes by 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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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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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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Today when I begin writing I’m aware: something that I don’t understand drives this engine.
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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Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.
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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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Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible - and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.
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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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The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.
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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.
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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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The form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.
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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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Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.
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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Your presence in this house is almost as painful and enormous as your absence.
Donald Hall
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Can build plane... Delivery about three months.
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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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