Essays After Eighty Quotes

“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

“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

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

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

“But nothing in human life is unmixed, and honors inevitably balance themselves with self-doubt. Everyone knows that medals are rubber”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is on the whole preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two. When I lament and darken over my diminishments, I accomplish nothing. It's better to sit at the window all day, pleased to watch birds, barns, and flowers. It is a pleasure to write about what I do.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“From April to October I watch the Red Sox every night. (Other sports fill the darker months.) I do not write; I do not work at all. After supper I become the American male--but I think I do something else. Try to forgive my comparisons, but before Yeats went to sleep every night he read an American Western. When Eliot was done with poetry and editing, he read a mystery book. Everyone who concentrates all day, in the evening needs to let the half-wit out for a walk.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“Every time I write, say, or think "lung cancer," I pick up a Pall Mall to calm myself.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“I watch a white landscape that turns pale green, dark green, yellow and red, brown under bare branches, until snow falls again.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“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.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“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.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“When I was thirty, I lived in the future because the present was intolerable. When I was fifty and sixty, the day of love and work repeated itself year after year. Old age sits in a chair, writing a little and diminishing.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“My problem isn’t death but old age. I fret about my lack of balance, my buckling knee, my difficulty standing up and sitting down. Yesterday I fell asleep in an armchair. I never fall asleep in a chair. Indolence overcomes me every day. I sit daydreaming about what I might do next: putting on a sweater or eating a piece of pie or calling my daughter. Sometimes I break through my daydream to stand up. At Christmas or birthday, I no longer want objects, even books. I want things I can eat, cheddar or Stilton, my daughter’s chili, and replacements for worn-out khakis, T-shirts, socks, and underwear.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“At sixteen, poets think that if they publish in a magazine that will be it. When it happens, it is not it. Then they think it will be it when they publish in Poetry. No. The New Yorker? No. A book? Good reviews? The Something Prize? A Guggenheim? The National Book Award? The Nobel? No, no, no, no, no, no. Flying back from Stockholm, the Laureate knows that nothing will make it certain. The Laureate sighs.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“The people I love will mourn me, but I won't be around to commiserate. I become gloomy thinking of insensate things I will leave behind. My survivors will cram into plastic bags the tchotchkes I have lived with, expanding a landfill. I needn’t worry about my Andy Warhols. I fret over the striped stone that my daughter picked up at the pond, or my father’s desk lamp from college, or a miniature wooden milk wagon from the family dairy. My mother approaching ninety feared that we would junk the Hummel figurines that decorated her mantelpiece, kitsch porcelain dolls popular from the forties to the sixties. Thus, a box of them rests in my daughter’s attic. More important to me is this house, which my great-grandfather moved to in 1865—the family place for almost a century and a half. In the back chamber the generations stored everything broken or useless, because no one knew when they might come in handy. My kids and grandkids don’t want to live in rural isolation—why should they?—but it’s melancholy to think of the house emptied out. Better it should burn down.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“An op-ed in the Boston Globe, remarking on near-corpses who keep on doing what they've always done, compared me to Mick Jagger. Never before had I been so honored. The columnist mentioned others: Keith Richards, Alice Munro, and William Trevor, who was born the year I was. At seventy, Jagger is a juvenile among us eighty-five-year-olds—but his face as he jumps and gyrates resembles something retrieved from a bog.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“Pam is cute and loves to work out. When her marriage ended, she found a new companion on an Internet site called Fitness Singles. At the moment, the two of them are bicycling through Italy.

When I divorced, I looked for women who lazed around after poetry readings.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“Exercise hurts, as well it might, since by choice and for my pleasure I didn't do it for eighty years.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“Then the surgeon general put terrifying labels on each pack, and by the millennium everyone decent knew that smoking was unforgiveable, like mass murder or Rush Limbaugh.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“Interviewing T.S. Eliot, I saved my cheekiest question for last. “Do you know you’re any good?” His revised and printed response was formal, but in person he was abrupt: “Heavens no! Do you? Nobody intelligent knows if he’s any good.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“It's okay to be pleased when an audience loves you, or treats you as deathless, but you must not believe it. Someone says that my reading is the best she has ever heard; a man tells me that he has read me for thirty years and that I am a giant in American letters. I know I’m not. Doubtless many praisers believe such extravagance when they say it, and it does no good to argue. I could tell them nasty things people have said about me in print. I could list the prizes I have not won and the anthologies from which I have been omitted. It is best to believe the praiser and dismiss the praise.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“For better or worse, poetry is my life.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“April is Poetry Month, the Academy of American Poets tells us. In 2013 there were 7,427 poetry readings in April, many on a Thursday. For anyone born in 1928 who pays attention to poetry, the numerousness is astonishing. In April of 1948, there were 15 readings in the United States, 12 by Robert Frost.

So I claim. The figures are imaginary, but you get the point.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“I survive into my eighties, writing, and oddly cheerful, although disabled and largely alone. There is only one road.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“As I work over clauses and commas, I understand that rhythm and cadence have little connection to import, but they should carry the reader on a pleasurable journey. Sentences can be long, three or more complete clauses dancing together, or two clauses with one leaning on the other, or an added phrase of only a few syllables. Sentences and paragraphs are as various as human beings.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“After a life of loving the old, by natural law I turned old myself. Decades followed each other--thirty was terrifying, forty I never noticed because I was drunk, fifty was best with a total change of life, sixty began to extend the bliss of fifty--and then came my cancers, Jane’s death, and over the years I traveled 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, Essays After Eighty

“If you have an overdeveloped ego, you are not scared of surrender.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“There’s one advantage to smoking, about which we agree. When our breathing starts to vanish, we will not ask, "Why me?”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“Because of multiple drafts I have been accused of self-discipline. Really I am self-indulgent, I cherish revising so much.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“Generation after generation, my family’s old people sat at this window to watch the year. There are beds in this house where babies were born, where the same babies died eighty years later.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty