145 Quotes by Donald Hall

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Everything important always begins from something trivial.

Poetry offers works of art that are beautiful, like paintings, which are my second favorite work of the art, but there are also works of art that embody emotion and that are kind of school for feeling. They teach how to feel, and they do this by the means of their beauty of language.