Top 40 Donald Hall Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Donald Hall

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

— Donald Hall

3. “Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years; don’t let them go, don’t publish them until you have kept them around for ten years: by that time, they ought to stop moving on you; by that time, you ought to have them right.”

— Donald Hall

4. “Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.”

— Donald Hall

5. “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!””

— Donald Hall

6. “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.”

— Donald Hall

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

— Donald Hall

8. “I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.”

— Donald Hall

9. “Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible – and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.”

— Donald Hall

10. “To grow old is to lose everything.”

— Donald Hall

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

— Donald Hall

12. “To grow old is to lose everything. Aging, everybody knows it. Even when we are young, we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads when a grandfather dies. Then we row for years on the midsummer pond, ignorant and content.”

— Donald Hall

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

— Donald Hall

14. “Less is more, in prose as in architecture.”

— Donald Hall

15. “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.”

— Donald Hall

16. “Words seem like drops of water in a stream that has its own wholeness and its own motion.”

— Donald Hall

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

— Donald Hall

18. “The greatest kindness would put a bullet in his bright eye.”

— Donald Hall

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

— Donald Hall

20. “I wish you were that birch rising from the clump behind you, and I the gray oak alongside.”

— Donald Hall

21. “Virtually every beginning poet hurts himself by an addiction to adjectives. Verbs are by far the most important things for poems-especially wonderful tough monosyllables like “gasp” and “cry.” Nouns are the next most important. Adjectives tend to be useless.”

— Donald Hall

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

— Donald Hall

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

— Donald Hall

24. “If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn’t wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.”

— Donald Hall

25. “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.”

— Donald Hall

26. “For most baseball fans, maybe oldest is always best. We love baseball because it seizes and retains the past, like the snowy village inside a glass paperweight.”

— Donald Hall

27. “The form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.”

— Donald Hall

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

— Donald Hall

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

— Donald Hall

30. “Worship is not love.”

— Donald Hall

31. “Baseball, because of its continuity over the space of America and the time of America, is a place where memory gathers.”

— Donald Hall

32. “Poetry is what I’ve done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems.”

— Donald Hall

33. “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.”

— Donald Hall

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

— Donald Hall

35. “Today when I begin writing I’m aware: something that I don’t understand drives this engine.”

— Donald Hall

36. “When we put words together – adjective with noun, noun with verb, verb with object – we start to talk to each other.”

— Donald Hall

37. “I don’t know where a poem comes from until after I’ve lived with it a long time. I’ve a notion that a poem comes from absolutely everything that every happened to you.”

— Donald Hall

38. “In football they measure forty-yard sprints. Nobody runs forty yards in basketball. Maybe you run the ninety-four feet of the court; then you stop, not on a dime, but on Miss Liberty’s torch. In football you run over somebody’s face.”

— Donald Hall

39. “But Blake’s voices returned to dictate revisions.”

— Donald Hall

40. “Anyone ambitious, who lives to be old or even old, endures the inevitable loss of ambition’s fulfillment.”

— Donald Hall

41. “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.”

— Donald Hall

42. “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.”

— Donald Hall

43. “Joe DiMaggio batting sometimes gave the impression, the suggestion that the old rules and dimensions of baseball no longer applied to him, and that the game had at last grown unfairly easy.”

— Donald Hall

44. “But there are no happy endings, because if things are happy they have not ended. 37.”

— Donald Hall

45. “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.”

— Donald Hall

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

— Donald Hall

47. “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.”

— Donald Hall

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

— Donald Hall

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

— Donald Hall