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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. "

Donald Hall

Solitude

School

Loved

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" One Oxford poet confessed to me that I had been scary because I talked American and wore tennis shoes. "

" 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. "

" Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems. "

" 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. "

" I'm happy to feed the squirrels - tree rats with the agility of point guards - but in fair weather, they frighten my finches. They leap from snowbank to porch to feeder and stuff their cheek pouches with chickadee feed. "

" 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. "

" Sound had always been my portal to poetry, but in the beginning, sound was imagined through the eye. "

" 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. "

Donald Hall

Book

Always

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Obviously, death is ahead of me. I don't look forward to dying one little bit. But, you know, I simply don't worry about it because it's going to happen to me as it does to anybody. "

" 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. "

" A fellowship to Oxford acquainted me with the depths of English cooking. By the twenty-first century, London's best restaurants are as good as Paris's, but not in the 1950s. "

" 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. "

" Poetry offers works of art that are beautiful, like paintings, which are my second favorite work of the art, but there are also works of art that embody emotion and that are kind of school for feeling. They teach how to feel, and they do this by the means of their beauty of language. "

" Both my New Hampshire great-grandfathers wore facial hair: the Copperhead who fought in the war and the sheep farmer too old for combat. "

" I really feel better about aging at the age of 86 than I did at 70. "

" 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. "

" It used to be that phrases and lines would come into my head, often many of them in a period of five days or a week, and maybe I didn't know what I was talking about, but the words had a kind of heaviness or deliciousness to them. "

" Friends die, friends become demented, friends quarrel, friends drift with old age into silence. "

" In December of 1952, my first wife, Kirby, and I left Vienna to drive through the Russian sector of Austria into Yugoslavia. "

" 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. "

" However alert we are, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. "

" I'd heard of writers who say they hate to write. Not me. I love to do it. "

Donald Hall

Say

Write

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When I was 12, I had a fondness for horror movies like the 'Wolfman.' The boy next door said I should read Poe. "

Donald Hall

Boy

Horror

" Contentment is work so engrossing that you do not know that you are working. "

" 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

Short

Story

" In my life, I've seen enormous increase in the consumption of poetry. When I was young, there were virtually no poetry readings. "