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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 hope the poem, as it goes on, gets more complicated, a little more demanding, a little more ambiguous or speculative, so that we’re drifting away from the casual beginning of the poem into something a little more serious.

  BILLY COLLINS
  DemandingGoesLittlesOnSerious
• 

  Some difficulty is warranted and other difficulty I think is gratuitous. And I think I can tell the difference. There are certainly very difficult poets that I really enjoy reading.

  BILLY COLLINS
  DifferencesDifficultPoetReadingThinking
• 

  This love for everyday things, part natural from the wide eye of Infancy, part a literary calculation

  BILLY COLLINS
  DayEveryEyeNaturalThings
• 

  A sentence starts out like a lone traveler heading into a blizzard at midnight, tilting into the wind, one arm shielding his face, the tails of his thin coat flapping behind him.

  BILLY COLLINS
  CoatFloatingMidnightTailsWind
• 

  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
• 

  But I think you could also put it a different way. 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
  DifferentObviouslyProbablyUnquoteWay
• 

  Humor is just an ingredient. It’s always been in poetry. It kind of dropped out of poetry I think during the 19th and up to the mid-twentieth century. But it’s found its way back. And it’s simply an ingredient.

  BILLY COLLINS
  DroppedFoundIngriidientPoetrySimply
• 

  Clarity is certainly a way toward disorientation because if you don’t start out – if the reader isn’t grounded, if the reader is disoriented in the beginning of the poem, then the reader can’t be led astray or disoriented later.

  BILLY COLLINS
  AstrayBeginningClarityDisorientatedPoemReader
• 

  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
• 

  The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. A lot of it has to do with tone because tone is the key signature for the poem. The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme.

  BILLY COLLINS
  ConstructedDNAFirstKeysSignaturesTime
• 

  I can’t picture myself starting out aiming to do anything or having much of an agenda.I think in writing a poem, I’m making some tonal adjustments, and it took me a long time to allow anything like fun into my poetry.

  BILLY COLLINS
  FunThinkingWriting
• 

  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
• 

  (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
• 

  Nationalism is a type of insanity in which the boundaries of a land replace God.

  BILLY COLLINS
  BoundariesInsanityLand
• 

  I could feel the day offering itself to me, and I wanted nothing more than to be in the moment-but which moment? Not that one, or that one, or that one.

  BILLY COLLINS
  FeelsMomentsOffering
• 

  When you get a poem [in a public place], it happens to you so suddenly that you don’t have time to deploy your anti-poetry deflector shields that were installed in high school.

  BILLY COLLINS
  InspirationMotivationSchool