Donald Hall Quotes

21 quotes in 375 categories

• The greatest kindness would put a bullet in his bright eye.
• Mere literary talent is common; what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.
• Your presence in this house is almost as painful and enormous as your absence.
• I wish you were that birch rising from the clump behind you, and I the gray oak alongside.
• The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.
• To desire to write poems that endure-we undertake such a goal certain of two things: that in all likelihood we will fail, and if we…
• But Blake's voices returned to dictate revisions.
• Today when I begin writing I’m aware: something that I don’t understand drives this engine.
• The form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.
• 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…
• I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.
• 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…
• Some of us are darkness lovers. We do not dislike the early and late daylight of June, but we cherish the increasing dark of November,…
• Each year the big garden grew smaller and Jane - who grew flowers by choice, not corn or stringbeans - worked at the vegetables more…
• If work is no antidote to death, nor a denial of it, death is a powerful stimulus to work. Get done what you can.
• 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…
• Work is style, and there is style without thought; not in theory, only in fact. When I take a sentence in my hand, raise it…
• I want to sleep like the birds then wake to write you again without hope that you read me.
• We made in those days tiny identical rooms inside our bodies which the men who uncover our graves will find in a thousand years shining…
• Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.

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