263 Quotes by Billy Collins

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

A poem is an interruption of silence, whereas prose is a continuation of noise.

The fly lands on the swatter.The movie runs backwardsand catches fire in the projector.This species apes us wellby talking only about itself

…(my father) would say nothing,And I could not find a silenceAmong the one hundred Chinese silencesThat would fit the one he createdEven though I was the one Who had just made up the businessOf the one hundred Chinese silences-The Silence of the Night Boat. And the Silence of the Lotus, Cousin to the Silence of the Temple BellOnly deeper and softer…

And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air

There are easier ways of making sense,the connoisseurship of gesture, for example.You hold a girl's face in your hands like a vase.You lift a gun from the glove compartmentand toss it out the window into the desert heat.

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.

You know the parlor trick.wrap your arms around your own bodyand from the back it looks likesomeone is embracing youher hands grasping your shirther fingernails teasing your neckfrom the front it is another storyyou never looked so aloneyour crossed elbows and screwy grinyou could be waiting for a tailorto fit you with a straight jacketone that would hold you really tight.

If you look a word up in the dictionary and twenty minutes later you're still wandering around in the dictionary, you probably have the most basic equipment you need to be a poet.