A Carnival Of Losses Quotes

“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

“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

“I drank whiskey because I was depressed, and whiskey made sure I stayed depressed.”
― Donald Hall, A Carnival Of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety

“In your eighties you are invisible. Nearing ninety you hope no one sees you.”
― Donald Hall, A Carnival Of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety

“The emotional intricacy and urgency of human life expresses itself most fiercely in contradiction. If any feeling makes a sunny interminable sky, the feeling is a lie and the sky is a lie. If at a moment of sun a part of the landscape collapses in earthquake, then feeling may establish itself.”
― Donald Hall, A Carnival Of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety

“Politics has clogged the air of my life.”
― Donald Hall, A Carnival Of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety

“Kate never had any money, but she loved to save it. When she was ninety-three her youngest daughter took her to a dollar store where she found an elevated tray filled with tiny aluminum percolators, one-cuppers. The frank and ethical enterprise attached a notice informing its customers that these percolators did not work. They were only 5 cents, so Kate bought two of them anyway.”
― Donald Hall, A Carnival Of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety

“When I was young, my language wore coats and shirts and trousers, neckties, bespoke shoes. In my lifetime as a writer I have cast off layer after layer of clothing in pursuit of nudity.”
― Donald Hall, A Carnival Of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety

“Jane has been dead for more than two decades. Earlier this year I grieved for her in a way I had never grieved before. At eighty-six, I was sick and thought I was dying. Twenty and twenty-one years ago, every day of her dying for eighteen months, I stayed by her side. It was miserable that Jane should die so young, and it was redemptive that I could be with her every hour of every day. Last February I grieved again, this time that she would not sit over me as I died.”
― Donald Hall, A Carnival Of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety

“In the eighties and nineties, a New England monthly named Yankee paid me $4,000 four times a year, each time for an essay of a thousand words. Playboy paid an enormous sum in 1975 for my essay “Fathers Playing Catch with Sons,” and Reader’s Digest reprinted it. In the new century, fees have considerably lessened. A few years ago, a diminished Playboy printed three new essays of mine, and the three stipends together amounted to less than 1975’s single check.”
― Donald Hall, A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety