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Billy Collins
15 quotes
“But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her,barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my window in one of the fragile cotton dresses of the poor. She will look in at me with her thin arms extended, offering a handful of birdsong and a small cup of light.”
Billy Collins (born 1941) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Tuesday, June 4th, 1991", sts. 14-15, in Poetry (July 1992) p. 215, and in The Art of Drowning (U of Pittsburgh P, 1995) p. 28
“I love the sound of the bone against the plate and the fortress-like look of it lying before me in a moat of risotto, the meat soft as the leg of an angel who has lived a purely airborne existence. And best of all, the secret marrow, the invaded privacy of the animal prized out with a knife and wallowed down with cold, exhilarating wine.”
Billy Collins (born 1941) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Osso Bucco", st. 1, in The Art of Drowning (1995) p. 8
“But tonight, the lion of contentment has placed a warm heavy paw on my chest.”
Billy Collins (born 1941) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Osso Bucco", st. 3, in The Art of Drowning (1995) p. 8
“You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and — somehow — the wine.”
Billy Collins (born 1941) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Litany", st. 7, in Poetry (February 2002) p. 249, and in Nine Horses (2002) p. 70
“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.”
Billy Collins (born 1941) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Aristotle", st. 1, in Picnic Lightning (U of Pittsburgh P, 1998) p. 100
“The complexity of women's undergarments in nineteenth-century America is not to be waved off, and I proceeded like a polar explorer through clips, clasps, and moorings, catches, straps, and whalebone stays, sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.”
Billy Collins (born 1941) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes", st. 5, in Poetry (February 1998) p. 277
“Novelists, playwrights, painters and others may hold in their heads the expectation of fame, but not poets. Having chosen that road, all one can dream of is the jealousy of one's rivals. Celebrity is unexpected and almost unseemly--it forces one to wear a constant look of chagrin, if that is possible. Unless you are Byron, who was the first poet to become a star. At its worst, fame means being known by strangers--enough to bring on waves of paranoia.”
Billy Collins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is important for the poet not to be emotional because you cannot see the world clearly with tears in your eyes.”
Billy Collins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Poetry in America is no longer a dirty word. While it is still far from the center of the culture, it is moving slowly inward from the margins. I believe more and more people are shedding their outmoded notions of poetry as an exotic hobby--the result of bad teaching and worse public image problems--and coming to the realization that poetry is about their lives. Poetry is about them.”
Billy Collins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I find it impossible to think of "favorite" poets. I would rather list the ones I cannot stand.”
Billy Collins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The person in the poem is a character like a character in fiction whom the poet has invented--without clothes or a family, or a place of birth, just a voice--to convey himself. Any resemblance he bears to the poet you meet on a signing line is slightly less than coincidental. Meeting the author is one of life's most reliably disappointing experiences, not because authors are such nasty people, but because you have already met them under the best possible circumstance--on the page.”
Billy Collins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The underlying theme of Western poetry is mortality. The theme of carpe diem asks us to seize the day because we have only a limited number of them. To see life through the lens of death is to approach the condition of gratitude for the gift (or simply the fact) of our existence. And as Wallace Stevens said, Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.”
Billy Collins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Wars begin through greed and vanity and are continued through the insanity of nationalism in which the boundaries of a land replace God.”
Billy Collins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was raised in a fairly strict religious family and attended 16 years of Catholic schools. I feel now that my sense of the spiritual is directly connected to my sense of wonder, my ability to be amazed by the fact of my existence in all its vital impermanence AND by the spectacular environment I wake up to every morning. I am guessing that this sense of wonder is what the creator, if there is one, is still feeling.”
Billy Collins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For the translator of poetry, there is no activity that brings you into a closer, more intimate contact with language, both the second language and your own language, which translation allows you to experience freshly. Of course, translation is the impossible art which is why it attracts often the best minds, at least those driven by difficulty. The best metaphor I know for translation is from my friend Eamon Grennan, who translated the poems of Leopardi. It's like walking in a clear mountain stream, looking at colorful stones in the water. You find one so gorgeous, you put it in your pocket, take it home and put it on a shelf. In the morning you are surprised that the stone looks so dull and without luster. You have the stone, but you have removed it from the water of its home language so it has lost its luster.”
Billy Collins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source