Quote

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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Donald Hall
Age: 89 †
Born: 1928
Born: September 20
Died: 2018
Died: June 23
Author
Critic
Poet
Writer
New Haven
Connecticut
World
Eye
Opens
Sound
Smaller
Read
Sensitive
Makes
Sounds
Wells
Ears
Well
Hear
Great
Eyes
Things
Literature
Acquired

More quotes by Donald Hall

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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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To grow old is to lose everything.
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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!
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Can build plane... Delivery about three months.
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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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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.
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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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.
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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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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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Baseball, because of its continuity over the space of America and the time of America, is a place where memory gathers.
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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Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.
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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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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 want to sleep like the birds then wake to write you again without hope that you read me.
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.
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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Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.
Donald Hall