Donald Hall Quotes

There's nothing like Opening Day. There's nothing like the start of a new season. I started playing baseball when I was seven years old and quit playing when I was 40, so it's kind of in my blood.

I've been wanting to do a book about baseball for the longest time, and nobody will let me do it. It's the one thing from America I really miss.

By 1968, I had lived 10 years in Michigan. Gradually, I had come to love watching Detroit's baseball club in its small, beautiful, antiquated Tiger Stadium - a baseball park as fine as Fenway Park or Wrigley Field, though it never got the adulatory press.

I've been around baseball for a really long time. I didn't know I could want to be here any more than I do, have any more love or passion for this. But being away, even for just a week, that was the worst. I didn't know what was going on. I never want to do that again.

You know the best thing about aeroplanes? Apart from the peanuts in little silver bags, I mean. It's looking out of the windows at the clouds and thinking maybe I could go walking in there. Maybe it's a special place where everything's okay. Sometimes I do go walking in the clouds but it's just cold and wet and empty. But when you look out of a plane it's a special world... and I like it.

Baseball has a special place in our hearts. It is the game that shows us as we would like to be.

My heart's with you, Bill, no matter how it turns out. My heart is with all of them, and I think that, even if we forget each other, we'll remember in our dreams.

Just like every other kid in my grade school, I was listening to my little radio plug in my ear when Mickey Mantle hit 18 post-season homers and won series after series for the Yankees. I listened and I learned from that. I think he was the original 'Mr. October,' but thank god it didn't stick.

The storm is over, there is sunlight in my heart. I have a glass of wine and sit thinking of what has passed.

The heart of the problem is not so much how we see objects in depth, as how we see the constant layout of the world around us. Space, as such, empty space, is not visible, but surfaces are.

At a few hundred kilometers altitude, the Earth fills half your sky, and the band of blue that stretches from Mindanao to Bombay, which your eye encompasses in a single glance, can break your heart with its beauty. Home you think. Home. This is my world. This is where I come from. Everyone I know, everyone I ever heard of, grew up down there, under that relentless and exquisite blue.

I would be lost without baseball. I don't think I could stand being away from it as long as I was alive.

Ford put a hand to his head. “Back up. Back up!” he cried. “You’re too close.” Heart pounding, I looked at the eight feet between us and pressed into the fridge. “I think he meant for the ghost to back up,” Jenks said dryly.

It's a Little Leaguers game that major leaguers play extraordinarily well, a game that excites us throughout adulthood. The crack of the bat and the scent of the horsehide on leather bring back our own memories that have been washed away with the sweat and tears of summers long gone...even as the setting sun pushes the shadows past home plate.

I thank heaven we have had baseball in this world... the kids... our national pastime.

Most of the bands that I really hold in my heart - you don't think about them as bands; they're just the soundtrack of your life.

America, the country of my heart, my second home.

Baseball ought never be hurried. It is the only unhurried institution we have left, which is one reason, I think, we love it.

American audiences love period pieces. America doesn't have a lot of old things. It's a new country so I think we're a little bit fascinated by that.

There is nothing wrong with good schmaltz, nothing wrong with good heart... The critics think I'm kind of corny. Well, I am corny. As long as people respond to it, I'm okay.

Americans have a taste for…rocking-chairs. A flippant critic might suggest that they select rocking-chairs so that, even when they are sitting down, they need not be sitting still. Something of this restlessness in the race may really be involved in the matter; but I think the deeper significance of the rocking-chair may still be found in the deeper symbolism of the rocking-horse. I think there is behind all this fresh and facile use of wood a certain spirit that is childish in the good sense of the word; something that is innocent, and easily pleased.

I'm just a beat up old third baseman. I'm just a small part of a wonderful game that is a tremendous part of America today.

There's only, I think, in life, three things that I do pretty well: Performing, I still can field ground balls, and I make nice kids.

Coonskin caps, Yankee bats, the Hound Dog man's big start. The A-bomb fears, Annette had ears, I lusted in my heart.

My heart shoots into my throat every time I think I see his loping walk, or catch sight of some floppy brown hair on a boy - but it's never him, and each time it isn't, my heart does a reverse trajectory down into the very pit of my stomach.