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" I really feel better about aging at the age of 86 than I did at 70. "
Donald Hall
Age
Aging
Than
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" Not everything in old age is grim. I haven't walked through an airport for years, and wheelchairs are the way to travel. "
Donald Hall
Old
Age
Airport
" I don't have a computer. I never have had one. "
Donald Hall
Had
Never
Computer
" 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
Me
Old Age
Feel
" 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. "
Donald Hall
Work
Think
Out
" In the fifties, no one wore beards. In Eisenhower's day, as in the time of the Founding Fathers, all chins were smooth, while during the Civil War, beards were as common as sepsis. "
Donald Hall
Day
Smooth
Time
" Both my New Hampshire great-grandfathers wore facial hair: the Copperhead who fought in the war and the sheep farmer too old for combat. "
Donald Hall
Farmer
New
Hair
" 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
Stuff
Children
Wife
" 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
Year
Blind
College
" 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
Day
Christmas
Important
" Everything important always begins from something trivial. "
Donald Hall
Important
Always
Everything
" 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
Man
Myself
Poetry
" I live in the house my great-grandfather moved to in 1865... I spent all my summers here as a kid haying with my grandfather, and it was my favorite place in the world. "
Donald Hall
House
Place
World
" 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. "
Donald Hall
Look
Death
Know
" By 1968, I had lived 10 years in Michigan. Gradually, I had come to love watching Detroit's baseball club in its small, beautiful, antiquated Tiger Stadium - a baseball park as fine as Fenway Park or Wrigley Field, though it never got the adulatory press. "
Donald Hall
Tiger
Small
Love
" 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
Go
Short
Story
" 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. "
Donald Hall
Writing
New
Pay
" 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. "
Donald Hall
Me
Christmas
Parents
" I expect my immortality will last about six seconds after my funeral. "
Donald Hall
Will
Expect
Funeral
" Divorce was miserable, as it always is, and we divorce for the same reasons we marry. "
Donald Hall
Divorce
Always
Same
" Contentment is work so engrossing that you do not know that you are working. "
Donald Hall
Know
Contentment
Work
" I don't publish anything I haven't worked over 100 times. "
Donald Hall
Times
Over
Worked
" Sound had always been my portal to poetry, but in the beginning, sound was imagined through the eye. "
Donald Hall
Poetry
Beginning
Always
" One Oxford poet confessed to me that I had been scary because I talked American and wore tennis shoes. "
Donald Hall
American
Scary
Poet
" Even famous poets such as Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams were rarely asked to read their poems. "
Donald Hall
Rarely
Read
Were
" I'd heard of writers who say they hate to write. Not me. I love to do it. "
Donald Hall
Me
Say
Write
" 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. "
Donald Hall
London
Best
Cooking
" 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
Like
" 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. "
Donald Hall
Books
Excitement
Harvard
" 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
Generation
Sometimes
Road
" Many times I have written something, and after it was published, I understood what I was saying. "
Donald Hall
Understood
Something
Many