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
Feel
Meet
Feels
Personal
Mutter
Every
Words
Comforting
Always
Someone
Depressed
Things
Certain
Shoulder
Persons
Cheer
Person
Shoulders
Better
Greatness

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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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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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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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Mere literary talent is common what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.
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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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Today when I begin writing I’m aware: something that I don’t understand drives this engine.
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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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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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Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.
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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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The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.
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Can build plane... Delivery about three months.
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We learned how to love each other by loving together good things wholly outside each other.
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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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Your presence in this house is almost as painful and enormous as your absence.
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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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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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Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.
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