Donald Hall > Quotes

“You think that their
dying is the worst
thing that could happen.

Then they stay dead.”
― Donald Hall

“I read poems for the pleasure of the mouth. My heart is in my mouth, and the sound of poetry is the way in." ~from an interview in Narrative magazine”
― Donald Hall

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

“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

“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

“Worship is not love.”
― 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”
― Donald Hall, Old And New Poems: Donald Hall's Finest Short Poetry on Landscape, Love, and Prophecy

“Safe Sex

If he and she do not know each other, and feel confident
they will not meet again; if he avoids affectionate words;

if she has grown insensible skin under skin; if they desire
only the tribute of another’s cry; if they employ each other

as revenge on old lovers or families of entitlement and steel—
then there will be no betrayals, no letters returned unread,

no frenzy, no hurled words of permanent humiliation,
no trembling days, no vomit at midnight, no repeated

apparition of a body floating face-down at the pond’s edge”
― Donald Hall

“The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.”
― Donald Hall, Claims for Poetry

“[O]ver the years I travelled to another universe. However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying--in the supermarket, these old ladies won't get out of my way--but most important they are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial. If we forget for a moment that we are old, we are reminded when we try to stand up, or when we encounter someone young, who appears to observe green skin, extra heads, and protuberances.”
― Donald Hall

“One day, of course, no one will remember what I remember.”
― Donald Hall

“Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.”
― Donald Hall

“It is sensible of me to be aware that I will die one of these days. I will not pass away. Every day millions of people pass away—in obituaries, death notices, cards of consolation, e-mails to the corpse’s friends—but people don’t die. Sometimes they rest in peace, quit this world, go the way of all flesh, depart, give up the ghost, breathe a last breath, join their dear ones in heaven, meet their Maker, ascend to a better place, succumb surrounded by family, return to the Lord, go home, cross over, or leave this world. Whatever the fatuous phrase, death usually happens peacefully (asleep) or after a courageous struggle (cancer). Sometimes women lose their husbands. (Where the hell did I put him?) Some expressions are less common in print: push up the daisies, kick the bucket, croak, buy the farm, cash out. All euphemisms conceal how we gasp and choke turning blue.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“We are all dying
of something, always,
but our degrees of
awareness differ

- from "Tubes”
― Donald Hall, Old And New Poems: Donald Hall's Finest Short Poetry on Landscape, Love, and Prophecy

“Literature starts by being personal, but the deeper we go inside the more we become everybody.”
― Donald Hall

“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.”
― Donald Hall

“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”
― Donald Hall, Old And New Poems: Donald Hall's Finest Short Poetry on Landscape, Love, and Prophecy

“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.”
― Donald Hall

“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.”
― Donald Hall

“Ox Cart Man

In October of the year,
he counts potatoes dug from the brown field,
counting the seed, counting
the cellar's portion out,
and bags the rest on the cart's floor.

He packs wool sheared in April, honey
in combs, linen, leather
tanned from deerhide,
and vinegar in a barrel
hoped by hand at the forge's fire.

He walks by his ox's head, ten days
to Portsmouth Market, and sells potatoes,
and the bag that carried potatoes,
flaxseed, birch brooms, maple sugar, goose
feathers, yarn.

When the cart is empty he sells the cart.
When the cart is sold he sells the ox,
harness and yoke, and walks
home, his pockets heavy
with the year's coin for salt and taxes,

and at home by fire's light in November cold
stitches new harness
for next year's ox in the barn,
and carves the yoke, and saws planks
building the cart again.”
― Donald Hall

“The tree is burning on the autumn noon
That builds each year the leaf and bark again.
Though frost will strip it raw and barren soon,
The rounding season will restore and mend.

Yet people are not mended, but go on,
Accumulating memory and love.
And so the wood we used to know is gone,
Because the years have taught us that we move.

We have moved on, the Tamburlaines of then,
To different Asias of our plundering.
And though we sorrow not to know again
A land or face we loved, yet we are king.

The young are never robbed of innocence
But given gold of love and memory.
We live in wealth whose bounds exceed our sense,
And when we die are full of memory.

-from "September Ode”
― Donald Hall, Old And New Poems: Donald Hall's Finest Short Poetry on Landscape, Love, and Prophecy

“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, Essays After Eighty

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

“But there are no happy endings, because if things are happy they have not ended.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“Anyone ambitious, who lives to be old or even old, endures the inevitable loss of ambition’s fulfillment.”
― Donald Hall, A Carnival Of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety

“Life is hell but death is worse.

- from "No Deposit”
― Donald Hall, Old And New Poems: Donald Hall's Finest Short Poetry on Landscape, Love, and Prophecy

“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.”
― Donald Hall, A Carnival Of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety

“Exercise is boring. Everything is boring that does not happen in a chair (reading and writing) or in bed.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“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.”
― Donald Hall, Old And New Poems: Donald Hall's Finest Short Poetry on Landscape, Love, and Prophecy

“Exiled by death from people we have known,
We are reduced again by years, and try
To call them back and clothe the barren bone,
Not to admit that people ever die.

-from "Exile”
― Donald Hall, Old And New Poems: Donald Hall's Finest Short Poetry on Landscape, Love, and Prophecy