59 Quotes & Sayings By Billy Collins

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. Billy Collins

The History TeacherTrying to protect his students' innocencehe told them the Ice Age was really justthe Chilly Age, a period of a million yearswhen everyone had to wear sweaters. And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age, named after the long driveways of the time. The Spanish Inquisition was nothing morethan an outbreak of questions such as" How far is it from here to Madrid?""What do you call the matador's hat?" The War of the Roses took place in a garden, and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom on Japan.The children would leave his classroomfor the playground to torment the weakand the smart, mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses, while he gathered up his notes and walked homepast flower beds and white picket fences, wondering if they would believe that soldiersin the Boer War told long, rambling storiesdesigned to make the enemy nod off. Billy Collins

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. 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. Billy Collins

This is what I think aboutwhen I shovel compostinto a wheelbarrow, and when I fill the long flower boxes, then press into rowsthe limp roots of red impatiens–the instant hand of Deathalways ready to burst forthfrom the sleeve of his voluminous cloak. Then the soil is full of marvels, bits of leaf like flakes off a fresco, red-brown pine needles, a beetle quickto burrow back under the loam. Then the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue, the clouds a brighter white, and all I hear is the rasp of the steel edgeagainst a round stone, the small plants singingwith lifted faces, and the clickof the sundialas one hour sweeps into the next. Billy Collins

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. Billy Collins

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

These days every morning begins like a joke you think you have heard before, but there is no one telling it whom you can stop. One day it's about a cow who walks into a bar, then about a man with a big nose on his honeymoon, then about a kangaroo who walks into a bar. Each one takes up an entire day. The sun looks like a prank Nathanael West is pulling on the world; on the drive to work cars are swinging comically from lane to lane. The houses and lawns belong in cartoons. The hours collapse into one another's arms. The stories arc over noon and descend like slow ferris wheels into the haze of evening. You wish you could stop listening and get serious. Trouble is you cannot remember the punch line which never arrives till very late at night, just as you are reaching for the bedside lamp, just before you begin laughing in the dark. Billy Collins

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. Billy Collins

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

The whole idea of it makes me feellike I'm coming down with something, something worse than any stomach acheor the headaches I get from reading in bad light--a kind of measles of the spirit, a mumps of the psyche, a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul. You tell me it is too early to be looking back, but that is because you have forgottenthe perfect simplicity of being oneand the beautiful complexity introduced by two. But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit. At four I was an Arabian wizard. I could make myself invisibleby drinking a glass of milk a certain way. At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince. But now I am mostly at the windowwatching the late afternoon light. Back then it never fell so solemnlyagainst the side of my tree house, and my bicycle never leaned against the garageas it does today, all the dark blue speed drained out of it. This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself, as I walk through the universe in my sneakers. It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends, time to turn the first big number. It seems only yesterday I used to believethere was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine. But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life, I skin my knees. I bleed. Billy Collins

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. Billy Collins

When i believe in everything, I could not seethe actors semicircled around a studio microphoneflipping the pages of scripts in unison. I only heard the voices, resonant, electric, adult, accusing each other of murder. Billy Collins

It seems only yesterday I used to believethere was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine. But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life, I skin my knees. I bleed. Billy Collins

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

The LanyardThe other day I was ricocheting slowlyoff the blue walls of this room, moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano, from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor, when I found myself in the L section of the dictionarywhere my eyes fell upon the word lanyard. No cookie nibbled by a French novelistcould send one into the past more suddenly–a past where I sat at a workbench at a campby a deep Adirondack lakelearning how to braid long thin plastic strips into a lanyard, a gift for my mother. I had never seen anyone use a lanyardor wear one, if that's what you did with them, but that did not keep me from crossing strand over strand again and againuntil I had made a boxy red and white lanyard for my mother. She gave me life and milk from her breasts, and I gave her a lanyard. She nursed me in many a sick room, lifted spoons of medicine to my lips, laid cold face-cloths on my forehead, and then led me out into the airy lightand taught me to walk and swim, and I , in turn, presented her with a lanyard. Here are thousands of meals, she said, and here is clothing and a good education. And here is your lanyard, I replied, which I made with a little help from a counselor. Here is a breathing body and a beating heart, strong legs, bones and teeth, and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered, and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp. And here, I wish to say to her now, is a smaller gift–not the worn truththat you can never repay your mother, but the rueful admission that when she took the two-tone lanyard from my hand, I was as sure as a boy could bethat this useless, worthless thing I wove out of boredom would be enough to make us even. Billy Collins

Perhaps the answer is simply one:one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet, a small jazz combo working in the background. She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautifuleyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans overto glance at his watch because she has been dancingforever, and now it is very late, even for musicians. Billy Collins

I think it’s vital. It’s odd to me because many people say we live in these awful times and we need culture and art especially in times like these, in these dire times. Well, first of all, I don’t think these times are more dire than other times. People who say that just need to go back and read Herodotus, read any book of history, read a biography of Attila the Hun. If people are going to wring their hands over these troubled times, I would think that humor should be indispensable. I find it strange that —at least in my take on it–the people who are the most alarmed about the dire times we live in are the ones who seem to be humorless, in their taste for poetry anyway. Humor is just an ingredient. . Billy Collins

A long time ago when cataclysms were commonas sneezes and land masses slidaround the globe looking for placesto settle down and become continents, someone introduced us at a party. Billy Collins

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. Billy Collins

There's something very authentic about humor, when you think about it. Anybody can pretend to be serious. But you can't pretend to be funny. Billy Collins

Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. It's 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. Billy Collins

I'm happy to stick with my persona. There are themes of love lost and love regained, but the main themes of all poems are basically love and death, and that seems to be the message of poetry. Billy Collins

If an artist is driven primarily by social responsibility, I think the art probably suffers because, again, just as leadership has a rather defined end point or purpose, social responsibility would seem to have a very clear moral context. Billy Collins

The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, 'What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?' That's the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing. Billy Collins

A lasting marriage, they say, is one where the two reach for different sections of the Sunday paper. Me, I go right for the obituaries, just like those very elderly characters in Muriel Spark's spooky novel, 'Memento Mori.' Billy Collins

I think more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies, and Loony Tunes cartoons. Billy Collins

Poetry can do a lot of things to people. I mean it can improve your imagination. It can take you to new places. It can give you this incredible form of verbal pleasure. Billy Collins

I'm trying to write poems that involve beginning at a known place, and ending up at a slightly different place. I'm trying to take a little journey from one place to another, and it's usually from a realistic place, to a place in the imagination. Billy Collins

One of the disadvantages of poetry over popular music is that if you write a pop song, it naturally gets into people's heads as they listen in the car. You don't have to memorize a Paul Simon song; it's just in your head, and you can sing along. With a poem, you have to will yourself to memorize it. Billy Collins

The life of Edward Estlin Cummings began with a childhood in Cambridge, Mass., that he described as happy, but he struggled in both his artistic and romantic exploits against the piousness of his father, an esteemed Harvard professor. Billy Collins

I'm a great believer in poetry out of the classroom, in public places, on subways, trains, on cocktail napkins. I'd rather have my poems on the subway than around the seminar table at an MFA program. Billy Collins

Poetry is my cheap means of transportation. By the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started. I would like him to be slightly disoriented at the end, like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a cornfield. Billy Collins

Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?' And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers. Billy Collins

Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice, there's no visual distraction. Billy Collins

I know my voice has a limited range of motion; I don't write dramatic monologues and pretend to be other people. But so far, my voice is broad enough to accommodate most of what I want to put into my poetry. I like my persona; I often wish I were him and not me. Billy Collins

I think if a poet wanted to lead, he or she would want the message to be unequivocally clear and free of ambiguity. Whereas poetry is actually the home of ambiguity, ambivalence and uncertainty. Billy Collins

In the long revolt against inherited forms that has by now become the narrative of 20th-century poetry in English, no poet was more flamboyant or more recognizable in his iconoclasm than Cummings. Billy Collins

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. Billy Collins

Listeners are kind of ambushed... if a poem just happens to be said when they're listening to the radio. The listener doesn't have time to deploy what I call their 'poetry deflector shields' that were installed in high school - there's little time to resist the poem. Billy Collins

I'm pretty much all for poetry in public places - poetry on buses, poetry on subways, on billboards, on cereal boxes. Billy Collins

We love, you know, children love the ingredients of poetry. And then they go into this tunnel that we call adolescence, and when they come out of it, they hate poetry. Billy Collins

I have my Poetry 180 project, which I've made my main project. We encourage high schools, because that's really where, for most people, poetry dies off and gets buried under other adolescent pursuits. Billy Collins

I don't think anybody reads a book of poetry front to back. Editors and reviewers only. I don't think anybody else does. Billy Collins

When I was a young man, I understood that poetry was two things - it was difficult to understand, but you could understand that the poet was miserable. So for a while there, I wrote poems that were hard to understand, even by me, but gave off whiffs of misery. Billy Collins

When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn't worth reading. Billy Collins

For most Americans, poetry plays no role in their everyday lives. But also for most Americans, contemporary painting or jazz or sculpture play no role either. I'm not saying poetry is singled out as a special thing to ignore. Billy Collins

People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover. Billy Collins

My persona is less miserable than a lot of contemporary poetry speakers are. Billy Collins

I'm all for poetry catching up with technology, and just as there are i Tunes, I think we should have i Poems. I mean, people should be able to walk around with their earbuds in and listening to poems on their i Pod. Billy Collins

I find a lot of poetry very disappointing, but I do have poets that I go back to. One book of poetry that I'd like to mention is 'The Exchange' by Sophie Cabot Black. Her poems are difficult without being too difficult. Billy Collins

Some honor Cummings as the granddaddy of all American innovators in poetry and ascribe to him a diverse progeny that includes virtually any poet who considers the page a field and allows silence to be part of poetry's expressiveness. Billy Collins