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

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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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Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.
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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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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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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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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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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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Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.
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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 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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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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I want to sleep like the birds then wake to write you again without hope that you read me.
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