145 Quotes by Donald Hall

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

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.

When we put words together - adjective with noun, noun with verb, verb with object - we start to talk to each other.

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

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

Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible - and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.

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!"

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.

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.