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Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible - and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.

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
Courses
Course
Best
Newspaper
Writing
Mostly
Newspapers
Paper
Usually
Terrible

More quotes by 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.
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To grow old is to lose everything.
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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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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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I wish you were that birch rising from the clump behind you, and I the gray oak alongside.
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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.
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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The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.
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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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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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 want to sleep like the birds then wake to write you again without hope that you read me.
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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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Can build plane... Delivery about three months.
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Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.
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Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.
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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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We learned how to love each other by loving together good things wholly outside each other.
Donald Hall
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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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Today when I begin writing I’m aware: something that I don’t understand drives this engine.
Donald Hall