Donald Hall Quotes

My grandmothers are full of memories, smelling of soap and onions and wet clay, with veins rolling roughly over quick hands, they have many clean words to say, my grandmothers were strong.

Regrets are the natural property of grey hairs.

In the summer of 1954, after several years in Austin, Minnesota, our family moved across the state to the small, rural town of Worthington, where my dad became regional manager for a life insurance company. To me, at age 7, Worthington seemed a perfectly splendid spot on the earth.

I never saw my grandfather because he had died before I was born, but I have good memories of my grandmother and of how she could play the piano at the old house.

Until I was five, my immediate family lived near my grandfather's farm where my mother had grown up and, with the exception of a few modern conveniences, had not changed a lot over the years.

Observation is an old man's memory.

When I'm 80 and sitting in a rocking chair listening to the Rolling Stones, there is absolutely no way I'm going to feel old or forget my younger days.

I've always been aware that to be named after someone from the past carries with it all kinds of bittersweetness.

I've got a soft spot for Theatr Colwyn because my granddad used to run the Colwyn amateur dramatic society in the 1930s.

I am ridiculously old-fashioned.

When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.

In my family, we don't die till we're 100 years old.

I'm saving that rocker for the day when I feel as old as I really am.

I'm lucky: almost all my family has lived to be very old. I have one grandfather who lived to be 100.

I am the son of poor peasants who came at a very young age to live in Algeria. I only recently saw the place where they were born, near the city of Marrakech.

The good old times—all times when old are good.

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms inside your head, and people in them, acting. People you know, yet can't quite name.

Old is when people compliment your alligator shoes, and you're not wearing any.

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 is an old guest house opposite my house, and grandsons visit from time to time from the U.S., every time grown up a little. I don't know whether the same grandchildren come every time or it is someone else.

Even city people have ancestors who had their hands in the dirt.

Human life, old and young, takes place between hope and remembrance. The young man sees all the gates to his desires open, and the old man remembers--his hopes.

Man is made of the wholly common, and custom is his nurse; woe then to them who lay irreverent hands on his old house-furniture, the dear inheritance from his forefathers: For time consecrates, and what is gray with age becomes religion.

Do old people always live in the past? What yesterday was firm and true, may not be so today.

Swift defined observation to be an old man's memory.