263 Quotes by Billy Collins

  • Author Billy Collins
  • Quote

    And strangely enoughthe only emotion I ever feel, is what the beaver must feel, as he bears each stick to his hidden construction, which creates the tranquil pond and gives the mallards somewhere to paddle, and the pair of swans a place to conceal their young

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  • Author Billy Collins
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    Form is any aspect of a poem that encourages it to stay whole and not drift off into chaos.

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  • Author Billy Collins
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    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.

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  • Author Billy Collins
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    Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. Its a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things can take place later. It really is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.

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  • Author Billy Collins
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    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.

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  • Author Billy Collins
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    There are interesting forms of difficulty, and there are unprofitable forms of difficulty. I mean, I enjoy some difficult poetry, but some of it is impenetrable and I actually wouldn’t want to penetrate it if I could, perhaps.

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  • Author Billy Collins
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    A motto I’ve adopted is, if at first you don’t succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried.

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  • Author Billy Collins
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    I think a good poem should have some inscrutable part. You can’t quite explain it. The poem can only explain itself to a certain limit and at that point you enter into a little bit of mystery. That for me is the perfect poem: to begin in clarity and to end in mystery.

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  • Author Billy Collins
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    It’s a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.

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