Quotes from Billy Collins

Dear Readers, Take my MasterClass. Buy my books. Watch The Poetry Broadcast. Eat Triscuits. Drink Jameson. Read, stretch, laugh, and listen to really good jazz.

On the dance floor, we were all doing the struggle.

There's something about death going on here.

and I cannot tell you how vastly my loneliness was deepened, how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed, when I found on one page a few greasy looking smears and next to them, written in soft pencil– by a beautiful girl, I could tell, whom I would never meet– "Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.

the curve of her young shoulders and the tilt of her downcast head would make her appear to be terribly alone and if you were there to notice this, you might go down as the first person to fall in love with the sadness of another

For I, too, am a serious student of cartoons.

The Code of the West Say what you want about me, but leave the horse I rode in on out of it.

A Memory It came back to me not in the way a thing might be returned to its rightful owner but like dance music traveling in the dark from one end of a lake to the other.

But having sailed some time ago Into the quiet cardigan harbour of my life," (42)

Do you realize that if you had started building the Parthenon on the day you were born you would be all done in only one more year? Of course, you couldn't have done it alone, so never mind, you're fine just as you are. You are loved simply for being yourself.

But did you know that at your age Judy Garland was pulling down $ 150,000 a picture, Joan of Arc was leading the French army to victory, and Blaise Pascal had cleaned up his room? No wait, I mean he had invented the calculator. Of course, there will be time for all that later in your life after you come out of your room and begin to blossom, or at least pick up all your socks.

The heads of roses begin to droop. The bee who has been hauling her gold all day finds a hexagon in which to rest.

And there is the silence of this morning which I have broken with my pen… — Billy Collins, from "Silence," The Trouble With Poetry - And Other Poems . (Random House August 10, 2011) Originally published 2005.

The dog (the poet) is on top of a locomotive,".... "He's got a box full of track, and he's frenetically laying down track in front of the train.

This is the beginning. Almost anything can happen. This is where you find the creation of light, a fish wriggling onto land, the first word of Paradise Lost on an empty page. Think of an egg, the letter A, a woman ironing on a bare stage as the heavy curtain rises. This is the very beginning. (from his poem, 'Aristotle')

This love for everyday things, part natural from the wide eye of infancy, part a literary calculation

are we just avoiding our one true destiny when we do that, averting our glance from Philip Larkin who waits for us in an undertaker's coat?

The boy at the far end of the train car kept looking behind him as if he were afraid or expecting someone

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.

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.

I learned snails don't have ears. They live in silence. They go slowly. Slowly, slowly in silence.

This love for everyday things, part natural from the wide eye of Infancy, part a literary calculation

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.

I am a nonparticipant of social media. I'm not much attracted to anything that involves the willing forfeiture of privacy and the foregrounding of insignificance.