Quote

And strangely enoughthe only emotion I ever feel, is what the beaver must feel, as he bears each stick to his hidden construction, which creates the tranquil pond and gives the mallards somewhere to paddle, and the pair of swans a place to conceal their young

Billy Collins

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Billy Collins
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 22
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
William James Collins
Young
Stick
Ponds
Ever
Creates
Strangely
Feel
Sticks
Conceal
Mallards
Must
Somewhere
Tranquil
Beaver
Feels
Bears
Pair
Paddle
Giving
Gives
Pairs
Beavers
Emotion
Construction
Swans
Place
Hidden
Pond

More quotes by Billy Collins

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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
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When I'm constructing a poem, I'm trying to write one good line after another. One solid line after another. You know a lot of the lines - some hold up better as lines than others. But I'm not thinking of just writing a paragraph and then chopping it up.
Billy Collins
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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
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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
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You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine.
Billy Collins
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I think the pleasure of form is that you have a companion with you besides all the poetry you have ever read.
Billy Collins
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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 well as I can, lost for a while in the home of the rain.
Billy Collins
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All I wanted was to be a pea of being inside the green pod of time.
Billy Collins
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I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness.
Billy Collins
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Death is what makes life fun.
Billy Collins
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You'll find i-poetry, you'll find that you can download poetry, that you can stuff your i-pod with recorded poetry. So just to answer the question that way, I think that poetry is gonna catch up with that technology quite soon.
Billy Collins
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I could look at you forever and never see the two of us together
Billy Collins
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Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice, there's no visual distraction.
Billy Collins
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One of these days I'm-a make me a book out of you.
Billy Collins
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Part of writing is discovering the rules of the game and then deciding whether to follow the rules or to break them. The great thing about the game of poetry is that it's always your turn - I guess that goes back to my being an only child. So once it's under way, there is a sense of flow.
Billy Collins
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I just think that the world of workshops - I've written a poem that is a parody of workshop talk, I've written a poem that is a kind of parody of a garrulous poet at a poetry reading who spends an inordinate amount of time explaining the poem before reading it, I've written a number of satirical poems about other poets.
Billy Collins
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I can hear the library humming in the night, a choir of authors murmuring inside their books along the unlit, alphabetical shelves, Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son, each one stitched into his own private coat, together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.
Billy Collins
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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
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This love for everyday things, part natural from the wide eye of Infancy, part a literary calculation
Billy Collins
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There's this pet phrase about writing that is bandied around particularly in workshops about finding your own voice as a poet, which I suppose means that you come out from under the direct influence of other poets and have perhaps found a way to combine those influences so that it appears to be your own voice.
Billy Collins