Billy Collins Short Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

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

Billy Collins

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

Billy Collins

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

Billy Collins

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

Billy Collins

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

Billy Collins

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

Billy Collins

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

Billy Collins

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

Billy Collins

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

Billy Collins

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

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

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

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

Billy Collins

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

Billy Collins

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

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

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 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 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

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