Quotes from Donald Hall

Death of a part is agony - from "The Red Branch

But there are no happy endings, because if things are happy they have not ended.

In newspapers and magazines I read about what's happening. Apparently Facebook exists to extinguish friendship. E-mail and texting destroy the post office. eBay replaces garage sales. Amazon eviscerates bookstores. Technology speeds, then doubles its speed, then doubles it again. Art takes naps.

But nothing in human life is unmixed, and honors inevitably balance themselves with self-doubt. Everyone knows that medals are rubber

These days most old people die in profit-making expiration dormitories. Their loving sons and daughters are busy and don't want to forgo the routine of their lives.

Are you past pity? If you have consciousness now, if I something I can call "you" has something like "consciousness," I doubt you remember the last days. I play them over and over: I lift your wasted body onto the commode, your arms looped around my neck, aiming your bony bottom so that it will not bruise on a rail. Faintly you repeat, "Momma, Momma.

Politics has clogged the air of my life.

In your eighties you are invisible. Nearing ninety you hope no one sees you.

A sculptor can tap-tap-tap all day and night, he often said, and remain lazy.

Jane has been dead for more than two decades. Earlier this year I grieved for her in a way I had never grieved before. At eighty-six, I was sick and thought I was dying. Twenty and twenty-one years ago, every day of her dying for eighteen months, I stayed by her side. It was miserable that Jane should die so young, and it was redemptive that I could be with her every hour of every day. Last February I grieved again, this time that she would not sit over me as I died.

If work is no antidote to death, nor a denial of it, death is a powerful stimulus to work. Get done what you can.

Kate never had any money, but she loved to save it. When she was ninety-three her youngest daughter took her to a dollar store where she found an elevated tray filled with tiny aluminum percolators, one-cuppers. The frank and ethical enterprise attached a notice informing its customers that these percolators did not work. They were only 5 cents, so Kate bought two of them anyway.

And every year, Ronald McDonald takes the Pulitzer.

The growth of poetry is a counterforce--and a response--to our culture of numbers and information, of digits and commerce. We read and write poems so that our psyches can speak to each other with intelligence in the language of feeling, acknowledging the multiplicity and contradiction of each human life.

In his journals Emerson wrote, "To every reproach I know but one answer, namely, to go again to my work. 'But you neglect your relations.' Too true, then I will work the harder. 'But you have no genius.' Yes, then I will work the harder. 'But you have detached yourself from people: you must regain some positive relation.' Yes, I will work the harder.

If you have an overdeveloped ego, you are not scared of surrender.

In 2013 there were 7,427 poetry readings in April, many on a Thursday. For anyone born in 1928 who pays attention to poetry, the numerousness is astonishing. In April 1948, there were 15 readings in the United States, 12 by Robert Frost. So I claim. The figures are imaginary, but you get the point.

Every now and then I meet someone certain of personal greatness. I want to pat this person on the shoulder and mutter comforting words: "Things will get better! You won't always feel so depressed! Cheer up!

Everyone who concentrates all day, in the evening needs to let the half-wit out for a walk.

Otherwise we attend to our poets when they are alive—to hear them, to praise them, to despise them, to use them. Death usually removes them. I expect my immortality to expire six minutes after my funeral. Literature is a zero-sum game.

She said that one of the advantages of being ninety was that she could read a detective story again, only two weeks after she first read it, without any notion of which character was the villain.

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.

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.

Generation after generation, my family's old people sat at this window to watch the year. There are beds in this house where babies were born, where the same babies died eighty years later.