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1. black
2. grey
3. blue
4. red
5. brown
6. white

So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.

Billy Collins

Related Topics

HeartNamesWall

Popular Authors

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More Billy Collins Quotes

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  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
  BirdLightOffering
• 

  I write two lines or three lines. I will immediately stop and turn into a reader instead of a writer, and I’ll read those lines as if I had never seen them before and as if I had never written them.

  BILLY COLLINS
  InsteadneverReaderStopWriterWritten
• 

  I was able to read poets that were – allowed me to be humorous without being silly.

  BILLY COLLINS
  AbleHumorousSilly
• 

  I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness.

  BILLY COLLINS
  KindObscureRudeness
• 

  One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally we are ignored by everybody else.

  BILLY COLLINS
  DifferencesEverybodyPoetrySelf
• 

  I mean, the sonnet will simply tell you, that’s too many syllables or that’s too many lines or that’s the wrong place. So, instead of being alone, you’re in dialogue with the form.

  BILLY COLLINS
  AloneDialogueSimplySonnetWrong
• 

  High School is the place where poetry goes to die.

  BILLY COLLINS
  DiesHighSchool
• 

  That’s the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing.

  BILLY COLLINS
  PoemReaderTalkingTravelWriting
• 

  I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.

  BILLY COLLINS
  MiserablePoetSeemed
• 

  And the reason I am writing this on the back of a manila envelope now that they have left the train together is to tell you that when she turned to lift the large, delicate cello onto the overhead rack.

  BILLY COLLINS
  EyeLeftOverheadRackTellTogetherWriting
• 

  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
  ChildGameGreatPoetryThingUnderWay
• 

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

  BILLY COLLINS
  EmbellishmentStyleVoiceWriting
• 

  I thought I would be completely content if I was recognized at some later point in my life as a third-rate Wallace Stevens.

  BILLY COLLINS
  LifePeoplePoetPopularRecognizedThought
• 

  Form is any aspect of a poem that encourages it to stay whole and not drift off into chaos.

  BILLY COLLINS
  AspectChaosForm
• 

  I thought originally when I was in school and I wanted to be a poet, I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.

  BILLY COLLINS
  MiserablePoetSchool
• 

  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
  AnswerTechnologyThinking