A biography for Donald Hallhasn’t been written yet.
“I felt the need to be more open and expressive of my feelings, not just about the hills and the countryside, but about the daily life.”
“Many years, I would publish four books - an anthology, a book of criticism, a new book of poems, a book of essays.”
“Everything important always begins from something trivial.”
“In 1952, I recited aloud for the first time, booming in Oxford's Sheldonian Theatre from a bad poem that had won a prize. I was twenty-three.”
“I've had someone, my assistant, type for me. I've done it that way for more than 50 years because I type with one finger, although quite rapidly.”
“I'm happy to feed the squirrels - tree rats with the agility of point guards - but in fair weather, they frighten my finches. They leap from snowbank to porch to feeder and stuff their cheek pouches with chickadee feed.”
“Contentment is work so engrossing that you do not know that you are working.”
“In the fifties, no one wore beards. In Eisenhower's day, as in the time of the Founding Fathers, all chins were smooth, while during the Civil War, beards were as common as sepsis.”
“Not everything in old age is grim. I haven't walked through an airport for years, and wheelchairs are the way to travel.”
“As I look at the barn in my ninth decade, I see the no-smoking sign, rusted and tilting on the unpainted gray clapboard. My grandfather, born in 1875, milked his cattle there a century ago.”
“One Oxford poet confessed to me that I had been scary because I talked American and wore tennis shoes.”
“Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems.”
“However alert we are, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy.”
“I write longhand; I make changes longhand, and I have an assistant who types it up. She lives 70 yards away. Every afternoon, I have a case I leave out on the porch, and she brings it back the next morning.”
“I'd heard of writers who say they hate to write. Not me. I love to do it.”
“I live in the house my great-grandfather moved to in 1865... I spent all my summers here as a kid haying with my grandfather, and it was my favorite place in the world.”
“There are books all around me... I don't read as much as I used to, but I always have a book or two going.”
“When I lived summers at my grandparents' farm, haying with my grandfather from 1938 to 1945, my dear grandmother Kate cooked abominably. For noon dinners, we might eat three days of fricasseed chicken from a setting hen that had boiled twelve hours.”
“After a couple of years of public high school, I went to Exeter - an insane conglomeration of adolescent males in the wilderness, all of whom claimed to hate poetry.”
“Both my New Hampshire great-grandfathers wore facial hair: the Copperhead who fought in the war and the sheep farmer too old for combat.”