Quote

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.

Billy Collins

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Billy Collins
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 22
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
William James Collins
Lines
Circles
Reading
Page
Words
Snow
Away
Pages
Straining
Light
Across
Crumbs
Find
Follow
Trail
Line
Trails
Becomes
Fresh

More quotes by Billy Collins

Image
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
Image
I think a good poem should have some inscrutable part. You can't quite explain it. The poem can only explain itself to a certain limit and at that point you enter into a little bit of mystery. That for me is the perfect poem: to begin in clarity and to end in mystery.
Billy Collins
Image
I think the pleasure of form is that you have a companion with you besides all the poetry you have ever read.
Billy Collins
Image
Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. Its 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
Image
I sit in the dark and wait for a little flame to appear at the end of my pencil.
Billy Collins
Image
I could look at you forever and never see the two of us together
Billy Collins
Image
Vade Mecum I want the scissors to be sharp and the table perfectly level when you cut me out of my life and paste me in that book you always carry.
Billy Collins
Image
High School is the place where poetry goes to die.
Billy Collins
Image
I hope the poem, as it goes on, gets more complicated, a little more demanding, a little more ambiguous or speculative, so that we're drifting away from the casual beginning of the poem into something a little more serious.
Billy Collins
Image
More often than not in poetry I find difficulty to be gratuitous and show-offy and camouflaging, experimental to a kind of insane degree - a difficulty which really ignores the possibility of having a sensible reader.
Billy Collins
Image
I'm very conscious of the fact that every line should have a cadence to it. It should contribute to the progress of the poem. And that the ending of the line is a way of turning the reader's attention back into the interior of the poem.
Billy Collins
Image
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.
Billy Collins
Image
The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.
Billy Collins
Image
The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you're simply using a pen to record what you have thought out.
Billy Collins
Image
I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational path through the day. To the left and right there are an amazing set of distractions that we usually can't afford to follow. But the poet is willing to stop anywhere.
Billy Collins
Image
This love for everyday things, part natural from the wide eye of Infancy, part a literary calculation
Billy Collins
Image
The first line is the DNA of the poem the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. A lot of it has to do with tone because tone is the key signature for the poem. The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme.
Billy Collins
Image
Another trouble with poetry - and I'm gonna stop the list at two - is the presence of presumptuousness in poetry, the sense you get in a poem that the poet takes for granted an interest on the reader's part in the poet's autobiographical life, in the poet's memories, problems, difficulties and even minor perceptions.
Billy Collins
Image
One of these days I'm-a make me a book out of you.
Billy Collins
Image
All I wanted was to be a pea of being inside the green pod of time.
Billy Collins