Quotes by Donald Hall

“I was a fool three years ago. One is always a fool three years ago.”

“It is about her death, but it is also about our life together, we were married 23 wonderful years,”

“I think Im probably finished writing about it now,”

“My great-great-grandparents owned the back pew and they were among those who built the structure back in the 1800s,”

“I came here every year when I was kid,”

“] came out in 1955, my first reviews were puffs. Then Stanley wrote a long, somewhat censorious review in Poetry magazine. He gave me hell about some things. He said good things about my skill, but it was a case of lots of skill but not much self-knowledge. Stanley was right .”

“Substitute teachers have a part in the success of these students”

As Henry Moore carvedor modelled his sculpture every day,he strove to surpass Donatello4. and failed, but woke the next morningelated for another try.

Worship is not love.

[O]ver the years I travelled to another universe. However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying--in the supermarket, these old ladies wont get out of my way--but most important they are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial. If we forget for a moment that we are old, we are reminded when we try to stand up, or when we encounter someone young, who appears to observe green skin, extra heads, and protuberances.

One day, of course, no one will remember what I remember.

Its almost relaxing to know Ill die fairly soon, as its a comfort not to obsess about my next orgasm.

My parents were willing to let me follow my nose, do what I wanted to do, and they supported my interest by buying the books that I wanted for birthdays and Christmas, almost always poetry books.

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.

Even famous poets such as Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams were rarely asked to read their poems.

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 dont try to turn that into some hope for a future that I could never know.

Not everything in old age is grim. I havent walked through an airport for years, and wheelchairs are the way to travel.

Everything important always begins from something trivial.

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.

As I grew older - collapsing into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into eighty-five - poetry abandoned me.