Quotes from Donald Hall

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.

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.

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.

Divorce was miserable, as it always is, and we divorce for the same reasons we marry.

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.

Many times I have written something, and after it was published, I understood what I was saying.

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.

Both my New Hampshire great-grandfathers wore facial hair: the Copperhead who fought in the war and the sheep farmer too old for combat.

However alert we are, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy.

When I was a child, I loved old people. My New Hampshire grandfather was my model human being.

Not everything in old age is grim. I haven't walked through an airport for years, and wheelchairs are the way to travel.

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.

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.

I really feel better about aging at the age of 86 than I did at 70.

In December of 1952, my first wife, Kirby, and I left Vienna to drive through the Russian sector of Austria into Yugoslavia.

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

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.

Mere literary talent is common; what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.

You think that their dying is the worst thing that could happen. Then they stay dead.

I read poems for the pleasure of the mouth. My heart is in my mouth, and the sound of poetry is the way in. ~from an interview in Narrative magazine

I want to sleep like the birds then wake to write you again without hope that you read me.

To desire to write poems that endure-we undertake such a goal certain of two things: that in all likelihood we will fail, and if we succeed we will never know it

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.

Worship is not love.