Billy Collins Quotes

33 Sourced Quotes

Wars begin through greed and vanity and are continued through the insanity of nationalism in which the boundaries of a land replace God.

Billy Collins
But some nights, I must tell you, I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep. I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness. I sing a love song as well as I can, lost for a while in the home of the rain.

Billy Collins
And the reason I am writing this on the back of a manila envelope now that they have left the train together is to tell you that when she turned to lift the large, delicate cello onto the overhead rack, I saw him looking up at her and what she was doing the way the eyes of saints are painted when they are looking up at God when he is doing something remarkable, something that identifies him as God.

Billy Collins
The one in the upper left-hand corner
is giving me a look
that says I know you are here
and I have nothing better to do
for the remainder of human time
than return your persistent but engaging stare.

Billy Collins
This is not what it is like to be you, I realized as a few of your magnificent clouds flew over the rooftop. It is just me thinking about being you. And before I headed back down the hill, I walked in a circle around your house, making an invisible line which you would have to cross before dark.

Billy Collins
It is important for the poet not to be emotional because you cannot see the world clearly with tears in your eyes.

Billy Collins
The underlying theme of Western poetry is mortality. The theme of carpe diem asks us to seize the day because we have only a limited number of them. To see life through the lens of death is to approach the condition of gratitude for the gift (or simply the fact) of our existence. And as Wallace Stevens said, Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.

Billy Collins
Life is a loaded gun that looks right at you with a yellow eye.

Billy Collins
The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Billy Collins
It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine.

Billy Collins
I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves, straining in circles of light to find more light until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs that we follow across a page of fresh snow.

Billy Collins
I was raised in a fairly strict religious family and attended 16 years of Catholic schools. I feel now that my sense of the spiritual is directly connected to my sense of wonder, my ability to be amazed by the fact of my existence in all its vital impermanence AND by the spectacular environment I wake up to every morning. I am guessing that this sense of wonder is what the creator, if there is one, is still feeling.

Billy Collins
So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.

Billy Collins
But my heart is always propped up in a field on its tripod, ready for the next arrow.

Billy Collins
I can hear the library humming in the night,
a choir of authors murmuring inside their books
along the unlit, alphabetical shelves,
Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son,
each one stitched into his own private coat,
together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.

Billy Collins
All I wanted was to be a pea of being inside the green pod of time.

Billy Collins
Here's to the wind blowing against this lighted house and to the vast, windless spaces between the stars.

Billy Collins
Of all the questions you might want to ask about angels, the only one you ever hear is how many can dance on the head of a pin. No curiosity about how they pass the eternal time besides circling the Throne chanting in Latin or delivering a crust of bread to a hermit on earth or guiding a boy and a girl across a rickety wooden bridge.

Billy Collins
And I should mention the light which falls through the big windows this time of day italicizing everything it touches...

Billy Collins
Poetry in America is no longer a dirty word. While it is still far from the center of the culture, it is moving slowly inward from the margins. I believe more and more people are shedding their outmoded notions of poetry as an exotic hobby—the result of bad teaching and worse public image problems—and coming to the realization that poetry is about their lives. Poetry is about them.

Billy Collins
The trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry...

Billy Collins
I find it impossible to think of "favorite" poets. I would rather list the ones I cannot stand.

Billy Collins
All they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

Billy Collins
A sentence starts out like a lone traveler heading into a blizzard at midnight, tilting into the wind, one arm shielding his face, the tails of his thin coat flapping behind him.

Billy Collins
I stared up at the ebbing quarter moon and the stars scattered like a handful of salt across the faraway sky...

Billy Collins
But tonight, the lion of contentment has placed a warm heavy paw on my chest.

Billy Collins
I love the sound of the bone against the plate and the fortress-like look of it lying before me in a moat of risotto, the meat soft as the leg of an angel who has lived a purely airborne existence.

Billy Collins
But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her, barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my window in one of the fragile cotton dresses of the poor. She will look in at me with her thin arms extended, offering a handful of birdsong and a small cup of light.

Billy Collins
You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine.

Billy Collins
I could feel the day offering itself to me, and I wanted nothing more than to be in the moment-but which moment? Not that one, or that one, or that one,

Billy Collins