145 Quotes by Donald Hall

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Work is style, and there is style without thought; not in theory, only in fact. When I take a sentence in my hand, raise it to the light, rub my hand across it, disjoin it, put it back together again with a comma added, raising the pitch in the front part; when I rub the grain of it, comb the fur of it, re-assemble the bones of it, I am making something that carries with it the sound of a voice, the firmness of a hand. Maybe little more.

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