Quotes from Donald Hall

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.

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.

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.

It is sensible of me to be aware that I will die one of these days. I will not 'pass away.'

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.

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.

We made in those days tiny identical rooms inside our bodies which the men who uncover our graves will find in a thousand years shining and whole.

Less is more, in prose as in architecture.

If our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.

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.

Great literature, if we read it well, opens us up to the world and makes us more sensitive to it, as if we acquired eyes that could see through things and ears that could hear smaller sounds.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

But Blake's voices returned to dictate revisions.

Exiled by death from people we have known, We are reduced again by years, and try To call them back and clothe the barren bone, Not to admit that people ever die. -from "Exile

Your presence in this house is almost as enormous and painful as your absence.

I drank whiskey because I was depressed, and whiskey made sure I stayed depressed.

When I was young, my language wore coats and shirts and trousers, neckties, bespoke shoes. In my lifetime as a writer I have cast off layer after layer of clothing in pursuit of nudity.

I watch a white landscape that turns pale green, dark green, yellow and red, brown under bare branches, until snow falls again.

Poetry gives the griever not release from grief but companionship in grief. Poetry embodies the complexity of feelings at their most intense and entangled, and therefore offers . . . the company of tears.