Donald Hall Quotes
Each season, my balance gets worse, and sometimes I fall. I no longer cook for myself but microwave widower food, mostly Stouffer's. My fingers are clumsy and slow with buttons.
Donald Hall
Quotes to Explore
I've always felt that poetry was particularly erotic, more than prose was... I say that you read poems not with your eyes and not with your ears, but with your mouth. You taste it.
Donald Hall
For better or worse, poetry is my life.
Donald Hall
Prose is not so dependent on sound. The line of poetry, with the breaking of the line - to me, sound is the kind of doorway into poetry. And my sense of sound, or my ability to control it, lapsed or grew less.
Donald Hall
When I finished my initial year at Oxford, I flew home to marry Kirby, who had been my girlfriend in college. We had met on a blind date.
Donald Hall
But the form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.
Donald Hall
In my life, I've seen enormous increase in the consumption of poetry. When I was young, there were virtually no poetry readings.
Donald Hall
Although I was paid a salary in Ann Arbor, my wife and children and I drank powdered milk at six cents a quart instead of the stuff that came in bottles. I was a tightwad.
Donald Hall
I write longhand; I make changes longhand, and I have an assistant who types it up. She lives 70 yards away. Every afternoon, I have a case I leave out on the porch, and she brings it back the next morning.
Donald Hall
In 1952, I recited aloud for the first time, booming in Oxford's Sheldonian Theatre from a bad poem that had won a prize. I was twenty-three.
Donald Hall
When I was a child, I loved old people. My New Hampshire grandfather was my model human being.
Donald Hall
I have written some poetry and two prose books about baseball, but if I had been a rich man, I probably would not have written many of the magazine essays that I have had to do. But, needing to write magazine essays to support myself, I looked to things that I cared about and wanted to write about, and certainly baseball was one of them.
Donald Hall
It is sensible of me to be aware that I will die one of these days. I will not 'pass away.'
Donald Hall
My problem isn't death but old age. I fret about my lack of balance, my buckling knee, my difficulty standing up and sitting down.
Donald Hall
I don't publish anything I haven't worked over 100 times.
Donald Hall
New poems no longer come to me with their prodigies of metaphor and assonance. Prose endures. I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is, on the whole, preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two.
Donald Hall
It used to be that one poet in each generation performed poems in public. In the twenties, it was Vachel Lindsay, who sometimes dropped to his knees in the middle of a poem. Then Robert Frost took over, and made his living largely on the road.
Donald Hall
Friends die, friends become demented, friends quarrel, friends drift with old age into silence.
Donald Hall
One Oxford poet confessed to me that I had been scary because I talked American and wore tennis shoes.
Donald Hall
After a couple of years of public high school, I went to Exeter - an insane conglomeration of adolescent males in the wilderness, all of whom claimed to hate poetry.
Donald Hall
However alert we are, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy.
Donald Hall
Many years, I would publish four books - an anthology, a book of criticism, a new book of poems, a book of essays.
Donald Hall
In anything you write - in a short story, a poem - there has to be a counter-motion; it can't go all in one direction.
Donald Hall
I would work until I got stuck, and I would put it down and pick up something else. I might be able to take a 20-minute nap and get to work again. That way, I was able to work about 10 hours a day... It was important to me to work every day. I managed to work on Christmas day, just to be able to say I worked 365 days a year.
Donald Hall
I felt the need to be more open and expressive of my feelings, not just about the hills and the countryside, but about the daily life.
Donald Hall
