Donald Hall Quotes
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Friends die, friends become demented, friends quarrel, friends drift with old age into silence.
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On September twentieth every year, I got to choose my menu - meatloaf, corn niblets, and rice were followed by candles on chocolate cake with vanilla icing and a scoop of Brock-Hall ice cream.
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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.
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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.
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Some days I feel good about my work, and sometimes I feel I've never written anything worthwhile. That's par for the course.
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Every afternoon, I shut the door of my bedroom to write: Poetry was secret, dangerous, wicked and delicious.
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Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems.
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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.
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There's a great deal of stripping away; in early drafts, I may say the same thing two or three times, and each may be appropriate, but I try to pick the best and improve it. I work on sound a great deal, and I will change a word or two, revise punctuation and line breaks, looking for the sound I want.
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I expect my immortality will last about six seconds after my funeral.
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When I lament and darken over my diminishments, I accomplish nothing. It's better to sit at the window all day, pleased to watch birds, barns, and flowers.
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There are books all around me... I don't read as much as I used to, but I always have a book or two going.
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Everything important always begins from something trivial.
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I have seen so many poets who were famous, who won all sorts of prizes, disappear with their death. I write as good as I can and don't try to turn that into some hope for a future that I could never know.
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As I look at the barn in my ninth decade, I see the no-smoking sign, rusted and tilting on the unpainted gray clapboard. My grandfather, born in 1875, milked his cattle there a century ago.
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I think my very best work came out when I was about 60, not when I was 20. I was publishing all the time when I was in my 20s, and some of those poems I still like. And there were a few after 60, and in my 70s, that I like. But they became fewer and fewer.
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In 1975, I quit my tenure, and we moved from Ann Arbor to New Hampshire. It was daunting to pay for groceries and the mortgage by freelance writing - but it worked, and I loved doing it.
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Divorce was miserable, as it always is, and we divorce for the same reasons we marry.
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We approached Athens from the north in early twilight, climbing a hill. When we reached its peak, we were dazzled to look down and see the Acropolis struck by one beam of the setting sun, as if posing for a picture.
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I grew up in the suburbs of Connecticut - during the school time of year - but I preferred it in New Hampshire. I preferred the culture, the landscape, the relative solitude. I've always loved it.
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Even famous poets such as Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams were rarely asked to read their poems.
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I have to do draft after draft... It takes me a long time, but I love doing it, and I have to do it every day, or I feel slack.
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I don't have a computer. I never have had one.
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I was at Harvard with a whole bunch of poets, and that was very rare. They published a lot of books because there was an excitement after the war that translated into poetry.