Billy Collins Quotes

33 Sourced Quotes

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
I could look at you forever and never see the two of us together

Billy Collins
Novelists, playwrights, painters and others may hold in their heads the expectation of fame, but not poets. Having chosen that road, all one can dream of is the jealousy of one's rivals. Celebrity is unexpected and almost unseemly—it forces one to wear a constant look of chagrin, if that is possible. Unless you are Byron, who was the first poet to become a star. At its worst, fame means being known by strangers—enough to bring on waves of paranoia.

Billy Collins
The person in the poem is a character like a character in fiction whom the poet has invented—without clothes or a family, or a place of birth, just a voice—to convey himself. Any resemblance he bears to the poet you meet on a signing line is slightly less than coincidental. Meeting the author is one of life's most reliably disappointing experiences, not because authors are such nasty people, but because you have already met them under the best possible circumstance—on the page.

Billy Collins