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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. "
Donald Hall
Choose
Chocolate
Cake
Related Quotes:
" 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
" Every afternoon, I shut the door of my bedroom to write: Poetry was secret, dangerous, wicked and delicious. "
Donald Hall
Wicked
Bedroom
Dangerous
" Sound had always been my portal to poetry, but in the beginning, sound was imagined through the eye. "
Donald Hall
Poetry
Beginning
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. "
Donald Hall
Life
Need
Daily
" 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
" 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
" 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
Me
Always
" 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
" 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
" 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
" I don't publish anything I haven't worked over 100 times. "
Donald Hall
Times
Over
Worked
" 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. "
Donald Hall
Balance
Death
Problem
" Some days I feel good about my work, and sometimes I feel I've never written anything worthwhile. That's par for the course. "
Donald Hall
Sometimes
Feel
Feel Good
" 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. "
Donald Hall
Point
Weather
Happy
" 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've had someone, my assistant, type for me. I've done it that way for more than 50 years because I type with one finger, although quite rapidly. "
Donald Hall
Done
Years
Way
" 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. "
Donald Hall
Down
Sun
Posing
" Each season, my balance gets worse, and sometimes I fall. I no longer cook for myself but microwave widower food, mostly Stouffer's. My fingers are clumsy and slow with buttons. "
Donald Hall
Slow
Balance
Cook
" 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
" I'd heard of writers who say they hate to write. Not me. I love to do it. "
Donald Hall
Me
Say
Write
" Contentment is work so engrossing that you do not know that you are working. "
Donald Hall
Know
Contentment
Work
" Many years, I would publish four books - an anthology, a book of criticism, a new book of poems, a book of essays. "
Donald Hall
Four
Years
New
" 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. "
Donald Hall
Better
Day
Birds
" I've always felt that poetry was particularly erotic, more than prose was... I say that you read poems not with your eyes and not with your ears, but with your mouth. You taste it. "
Donald Hall
Say
You
Poetry
" 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. "
Donald Hall
She
Changes
Leave
" 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. "
Donald Hall
Words
Kind
Head
" When it comes to poetry, I think partly the numbers of people attempting to write poems is probably a result or the reaction to technology. "
Donald Hall
Poetry
Write
Think
" I expect my immortality will last about six seconds after my funeral. "
Donald Hall
Will
Expect
Funeral
" As I grew older - collapsing into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into eighty-five - poetry abandoned me. "
Donald Hall
Seventies
Me
Ahead
" Everything important always begins from something trivial. "
Donald Hall
Important
Always
Everything