263 Quotes by Billy Collins

though they know in their adult hearts,even as they threaten to banish Timmy to bedfor his appalling behavior,that their bosses are Big Fatty Stupids,their wives are Dopey Dopeheadsand that they themselves are Mr. Sillypants.

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

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.

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

It is time to float on the waters of the night. Time to wrap my arms around this book and press it to my chest, life preserver in a sea of unremarkable men and women, anonymous faces on the street, a hundred thousand unalphabetized things, a million forgotten hours.

But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her, barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my windowin 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.

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

all they want to dois tie the poem to a chair with ropeand torture a confession out of it.They begin beating it with a hoseto find out what it really means.

I love to move like a mouse inside this puzzle for the body, balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.