Quotes from Billy Collins

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night to 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.

And the reason I am writing this on the back of a manila envelope now that they have left the train together is to tell you that when she turned to lift the large, delicate cello onto the overhead rack, I saw him looking up at her and what she was doing the way the eyes of saints are painted when they are looking up at God when he is doing something remarkable, something that identifies him as God.

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?

O Canada I have not forgotten you, as I kneel in my canoe, beholding this vision of a bookcase. You are the paddle, the snowshoe, the cabin in the pines. You are the moose in the clearing and the moosehead on the wall. You are the rapids, the propeller, the kerosene lamp. You are the dust that coats the roadside berries. But not only that, you are the two boys with pails walking along that road.

saw him looking up at her and what she was doing the way the eyes of saints are painted when they are looking up at God when he is doing something remarkable, something that identifies him as God.

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 beautiful eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over to glance at his watch because she has been dancing forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.

In a while, one of us will go up to bed and the other one will follow. Then we will slip below the surface of the night into miles of water, drifting down and down to the dark, soundless bottom until the weight of dreams pulls us lower still, below the shale and layered rock, beneath the strata of hunger and pleasure, into the broken bones of the earth itself, into the marrow of the only place we know.

one burst after another as my wife turned in her sleep. I was a single monkey trying to type the opening lines of my Hamlet

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

It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.

My Hero Just as the hare is zipping across the finish line, the tortoise has stopped once again by the roadside, this time to stick out his neck and nibble a bit of sweet grass, unlike the previous time when he was distracted by a bee humming in the heart of a wildflower.

The girl who signed her papers in lipstick leans against the drugstore, smoking, brushing her hair like a machine

In the freakish pink and gray of dawn I took his death to bed with me and his death was my bed and in every corner of the room it hid from the light, and then it was the light of day and the next day and all the days to follow, and it moved into the future like the sharp tip of a pen moving across an empty page.

would pass in the street, mostly people whose existence I did not believe in

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-pong game of proofreading, glancing back and forth from page to page, the chefs are dicing celery and potatoes, and the poets are at their windows because it is their job for which they are paid nothing every Friday afternoon.

I feel like the secretary to the morning whose only/ responsibility is to take down its bright, airy dictation/ until it's time to go to lunch with the other girls,/ all of us ordering the cottage cheese with half a pear.

It's overwhelming to think of all the things I'm not doing today, including being born." (106) from "April 21st

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 compartment and toss it out the window into the desert heat.

No Time In a rush this weekday morning, I tap the horn as I speed past the cemetery where my parents lie buried side by side under a smooth slab of granite. Then, all day long, I think of him rising up to give me that look of knowing disapproval while my mother calmly tells him to lie back down.

my father) would say nothing, And I could not find a silence Among the one hundred Chinese silences That would fit the one he created Even though I was the one Who had just made up the business Of the one hundred Chinese silences- The Silence of the Night Boat. And the Silence of the Lotus, Cousin to the Silence of the Temple Bell Only deeper and softer…

Yet the one I think of most often_¨

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

You are turning me like someone turning a globe in her hand, and yes, I have another side like a China no one, not even me, has ever seen. So describe to me what's there, say what you are looking at and I will close my eyes so I can see it too, the oxcarts and all the lively flags. I love the sound of your voice like a little saxophone telling me what I could never know unless I dug a hole all the way down through the core of myself.

Yet the one I think of most often… was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye… "Pardon the egg salad, but I'm in love.