Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" 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
Related Quotes:
" Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems. "
Donald Hall
My Life
Poetry
Done
" 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 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
" 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
" 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 have a computer. I never have had one. "
Donald Hall
Had
Never
Computer
" Divorce was miserable, as it always is, and we divorce for the same reasons we marry. "
Donald Hall
Divorce
Always
Same
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Even famous poets such as Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams were rarely asked to read their poems. "
Donald Hall
Rarely
Read
Were
" 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. "
Donald Hall
Beautiful
Work
School
" I really feel better about aging at the age of 86 than I did at 70. "
Donald Hall
Age
Aging
Than
" When I lived summers at my grandparents' farm, haying with my grandfather from 1938 to 1945, my dear grandmother Kate cooked abominably. For noon dinners, we might eat three days of fricasseed chicken from a setting hen that had boiled twelve hours. "
Donald Hall
Three
Eat
Chicken
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Donald Hall
Born
Barn
Look
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Prose is not so dependent on sound. The line of poetry, with the breaking of the line - to me, sound is the kind of doorway into poetry. And my sense of sound, or my ability to control it, lapsed or grew less. "
Donald Hall
Kind
Control
Line
" 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
" I expect my immortality will last about six seconds after my funeral. "
Donald Hall
Will
Expect
Funeral
" 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
" 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'd heard of writers who say they hate to write. Not me. I love to do it. "
Donald Hall
Me
Say
Write
" 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 don't publish anything I haven't worked over 100 times. "
Donald Hall
Times
Over
Worked
" One Oxford poet confessed to me that I had been scary because I talked American and wore tennis shoes. "
Donald Hall
American
Scary
Poet
" 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