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

“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

“These days most old people die in profit-making expiration dormitories. Their loving sons and daughters are busy and don’t want to forgo the routine of their lives.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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 there are no happy endings, because if things are happy they have not ended.”
― 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

“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.”
― 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.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“She said that one of the advantages of being ninety was that she could read a detective story again, only two weeks after she first read it, without any notion of which character was the villain.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“Everyone who concentrates all day, in the evening needs to let the half-wit out for a walk.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“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 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

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

“It sounds like a lot of work for my mother, but cooking was almost all she did. In suburban Connecticut, middle-class women were required to stay at home and do nothing but cook and iron. Housecleaning was for immigrants.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“Otherwise we attend to our poets when they are alive—to hear them, to praise them, to despise them, to use them. Death usually removes them. I expect my immortality to expire six minutes after my funeral. Literature is a zero-sum game.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“It is best to believe the praiser and dismiss the praise.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty