263 Quotes by Billy Collins

Is there a better method of departure by night than this quiet bon voyage with an open book, the sole companion who has come to see you off, to wave you into the dark waters beyond language?

The birds are in their trees,the toast is in the toaster,and the poets are at their windows.[...]The proofreaders are playing the ping-ponggame of proofreading,glancing back and forth from page to page,the chefs are dicing celery and potatoes,and the poets are at their windowsbecause it is their job for whichthey are paid nothing every Friday afternoon.

After counting all the sheep in the worldI enumerate the wildebeests, snails,camels, skylarks, etc.,then I add up all the zoos and aquariums,country by country.By early light I am asleepin a nightmare about drowning in the Flood,

This is the beginning. Almost anything can happen. This is your first night with her, your first night without her. This is the middle. Things have had time to get more complicated, messy really. Nothing is simple anymore. And this is the end. It is me hitting the period and you closing the book.

Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.

I can see one of them clearly now, walkingalong with a newspaper tucked under his arm.he has cut himself shaving and a bit of tissuewith a circle of blood is stuck to his cheek,

You trip over a word while carryinga tray of vocabulary out to the poolonly to discover that broken glassis a good topic.

The name of the author is the first to gofollowed obediently by the title, the plot,the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novelwhich suddenly becomes one you have never read,never even heard of,as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbordecided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the nightto look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.