Favorite Quote by Billy Collins

“It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine. But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life, I skin my knees. I bleed.” quote by Billy Collins — Download Open image

““It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine. But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life, I skin my knees. I bleed.””

Billy Collins

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More by Billy Collins

“The whole idea of it makes me feel Like I’m coming down with something, Something worse than any stomach ache Or the headaches I get from reading in bad light – A kind of measles of the spirit A mumps of the psyche, A disfiguring chicken pox of the soul. You tell me it is too early to be looking…

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I think clarity is the real risk in poetry because you are exposed. You're out in the open field. You're actually saying things that…

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...pleasure, of course, is a slippery word… Our pleasures ultimately belong to us, not to the pleasure's so

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I stared up at the ebbing quarter moon and the stars scattered like a handful of salt across the faraway sky...

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Death is what makes life fun.

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A trouble with poetry 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. I try to presume that no one is interested in me. And I think experience…

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You come by your style by learning what to leave out. At first you tend to overwrite—embellishment instead of insight. You either continue to…

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But my heart is always propped up in a field on its tripod, ready for the next arrow.

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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…

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Every Day Is for the Thief is a vivid, episodic evocation of the truism that you can't go home again; but that doesn't mean…

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Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. Its a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things…

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You know how sometimes you just have a memory of looking up and seeing a face looking over your crib and then remember nothing until tenth grade? - I have one of these early memories where I'm in the back of my parents' car, a place I loved to spend a lot of time as an only child, not having…

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