Quotes from Donald Hall

Love is like sounds, whose last reverberations / Hang on the leaves of strange trees, on mountains / As distant as the curving of the earth, / Where the snow hangs still in the middle of the air. -from Love is Like Sounds

The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.

Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.

One day, of course, no one will remember what I remember.

We are all dying of something, always, but our degrees of awareness differ - from Tubes

As Henry Moore carved or modelled his sculpture every day, he strove to surpass Donatello 4. and failed, but woke the next morning elated for another try.

Nothing I do will make death disappear Or let your shudder or your knowledge go. See the world whole, and see it clearly then, A globe of dirt crusted with bones of men. If we walk, we walk on graves. - from Shudder

Literature starts by being personal, but the deeper we go inside the more we become everybody.

It's almost relaxing to know I'll die fairly soon, as it's a comfort not to obsess about my next orgasm.

When I was nineteen, I told a thirty- year-old man what a fool I had been when I was seventeen. 'We were always,' he said glancing down, 'a fool two years ago.

Now and then, especially at night, solitude loses its soft power and loneliness takes over. I am grateful when solitude returns.

Chipmunks jump, and greensnakes slither. Rather burst than not be with her. Bluebirds fight, but bears are stronger. We've got fifty years or longer. Hoptoads hop, but hogs are fatter. Nothing else but Us can matter.

Anyone ambitious, who lives to be old or even old , endures the inevitable loss of ambition's fulfillment.

Life is hell but death is worse. - from No Deposit

Essays, like poems and stories and novels, marry heaven and hell. Contradiction is the cellular structure of life. Sometimes north dominates, sometimes south—but if the essay doesn't include contraries, however small they be, the essay fails.

When I was sixteen I read ten books a week: E.E. Cummings, William Faulkner, Henry James, Hart Crane, John Steinbeck. I thought I progressed in literature by reading faster and faster--but reading more is reading less. I learned to slow down.

We die of habits, deplorable ones like merely living: finally fatal. - from Tubes

When a long-desired baby is born, what joy! More happiness than we find in sex, more than we take in success, revenge, or wealth. But should the same infant die, would you measure the horror on the same rule? Grief weighs down the seesaw, joy cannot budget it.

Exercise is boring. Everything is boring that does not happen in a chair (reading and writing) or in bed.

Baseball is continuous, like nothing else among American things, an endless game of repeated summers, joining the long generations of all the fathers and all the sons.