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

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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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Mere literary talent is common what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.
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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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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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I want to sleep like the birds then wake to write you again without hope that you read me.
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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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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 is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.
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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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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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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 see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.
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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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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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