"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?' T...
No one here likes a wet dog.
More Billy Collins quotes
"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 o...
"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...
"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 equ...
"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 f...
"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, an...
"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 unremarkabl...
"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 impa...
"I love to move like a mouse inside this puzzle for the body, balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.
"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 y...
"The History TeacherTrying to protect his students' innocencehe told them the Ice Age was really justthe Chilly Age, a period of a million yearswhen ev...
"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 cr...
"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...
"I can hear the library humming in the night, a choir of authors murmuring inside their books along the unlit, alphabetical shelves, Giovanni Pontano...
"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 ...