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

  BILLY COLLINS
  FormPleasureReadThinking
• 

  All they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

  BILLY COLLINS
  BeatingMeanRopeTieTies
• 

  You, quote, find your voice, unquote, when you are able to invent this one character who resembles you, obviously, and probably is more like you than anyone else on earth, but is not the equivalent to you.

  BILLY COLLINS
  CharacterEarthEqiuipvalentResemblesVoice
• 

  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
  AgendasDiscoveryWriting
• 

  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
• 

  Poems are not easy to start, and they’re not easy to finish. There’s a great pleasure in – I wouldn’t say ease, but maybe kind of a fascinated ease that accompanies the actual writing of the poem. I find it very difficult to get started.

  BILLY COLLINS
  DifferenceEaseGraduationKindWriting
• 

  I had a sense, I guess, from just reading a lot of poetry of how a poem would start and how it would end but really I didn’t know what I was doing. It had very little connection to my life.

  BILLY COLLINS
  ConnectingInterestingPoemPoetrySense
• 

  A return to his native Nigeria plunges Cole’s charming narrator into a tempest of chaos, contradiction, and kinship in a place both endearingly familiar and unnervingly strange. The result is a tale that engages and disturbs.

  BILLY COLLINS
  ContrActionFamiliarKinshipResultTempest
• 

  I felt at some point that I had nothing to lose, and [laughs] maybe I was wrong. I think, you know, there’s always these little autobiographical secrets behind things. I think I was really attacking my earlier self, and this kind of pretentious figure.

  BILLY COLLINS
  LaughingSelfThinking
• 

  Introduction To Poetry I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch.

  BILLY COLLINS
  MeanNamesWall
• 

  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
• 

  Bugs Bunny is my muse.

  BILLY COLLINS
  BugsBunniesCreativity
• 

  High School is the place where poetry goes to die.

  BILLY COLLINS
  DiesHighSchool
• 

  (Again I’m trying to give you a finite version of this career.) And then I came under the sway of Wallace Stevens when I was in college and graduate school, and basically set as a life goal the ambition of writing third-rate Wallace Stevens.

  BILLY COLLINS
  AmbitionBasicallyCareerGoalGraduationVersion
• 

  The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.

  BILLY COLLINS
  MindPaperRelieveTrained
• 

  Usually the poems are written in one sitting. There’s always a groping towards some satisfying ending. But I’d say the hardest part is not writing. Once the writing starts, it’s too pleasurable to think of it as a difficulty.

  BILLY COLLINS
  OncePleasurableSittingThinkingWriting