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
Some Similar Quotes
  1. I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. <span style="margin:15px;... - Neil Gaiman
  2. Well my music was different in high school; I was singing about love–you know, things I don't care about anymore. - Lady Gaga
  3. I'm the girl nobody knows until she commits suicide. Then suddenly everyone had a class with her. - Tom Leveen
  4. The difference between school and life? In school, you're taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you're given a test that teaches you a lesson. - Tom Bodett
  5. Once you leave out all the bullshit they teach you in school, life gets really simple. - George Carlin
More Quotes By Billy Collins
  1. 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
  2. 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,...
  3. 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....
  4. 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,
  5. 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.
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