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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

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More Billy Collins Quotes

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  I’m speaking to someone I’m trying to get to fall in love with me. I’m trying to speak intimately to one person. That should be clear. I’m not speaking to an audience. I’m not writing for the podium.

  BILLY COLLINS
  FallingLovePodiumSilenceWriting
• 

  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 you’re not free to try.

  BILLY COLLINS
  DayEveryHomeMeanTrying
• 

  Poetry is like standing on the edge of a lake on a moonlit night and the light of the moon is always pointing straight at you.

  BILLY COLLINS
  LakesMoonNightPointing
• 

  It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine.

  BILLY COLLINS
  BelieveCuttingYesterday
• 

  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
• 

  Death is what makes life fun.

  BILLY COLLINS
  DeathFun Life
• 

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

  BILLY COLLINS
  AcrossFarawayMoonSkyStars
• 

  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
  ListeningRadioSchool
• 

  When I wrote I took on the role of the despondent and difficult to understand person. Whereas in life, I was easy to understand, to the point of being simple-minded maybe.

  BILLY COLLINS
  EasyPersonRolesSimpleUnderstand
• 

  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
  CirclesLightReading
• 

  I think the pleasure of form is that you have a companion with you besides all the poetry you have ever read.

  BILLY COLLINS
  FormPleasureReadThinking
• 

  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
• 

  In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.

  BILLY COLLINS
  OneselfProcessVoice
• 

  I see the progress typical in some of my poems as starting with something simple and moving into something more demanding. This is certainly the pattern of weird poetry.

  BILLY COLLINS
  MovingProgressSimple
• 

  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
  DegreesExperimentalInsaneKindMoreOften
• 

  Now I would say at any given moment in American life, there are probably 45 poets in airplanes vectoring across the country heading towards…

  BILLY COLLINS
  AcrossAirplaneCountryReadingTowards