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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

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HeartNamesWall

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More Billy Collins Quotes

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  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
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• 

  I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational path through the day. To the left and right there are an amazing set of distractions that we usually can’t afford to follow. But the poet is willing to stop anywhere.

  BILLY COLLINS
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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 are comprehensible, and it’s easy to criticize something you can understand.

  BILLY COLLINS
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• 

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

  BILLY COLLINS
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• 

  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
• 

  As soon as I start to write I’m very aware, I’m trying to be aware that a reader just might well pick up this poem, a stranger. So when I’m writing – and I think that this is important for all writers – I’m trying to be a writer and a reader back and forth.

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• 

  No one here likes a wet dog.

  BILLY COLLINS
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• 

  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
• 

  While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.

  BILLY COLLINS
  NovelistsPoetTypewriters
• 

  Another trouble with poetry – and I’m gonna stop the list at two – is the presence of presumptuousness in poetry.

  BILLY COLLINS
  MemoriesPerceptionTwo
• 

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

  BILLY COLLINS
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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.

  BILLY COLLINS
  AcrossFarawayMoonSkyStars
• 

  I saw him looking up at her and what she was doing the way the eyes of saints are painted when they are looking up at God when he is doing something remarkable, something that identifies him as God.

  BILLY COLLINS
  GodLookingRemarkableSaintSomething
• 

  I can hear the library humming in the night, a choir of authors murmuring inside their books along the unlit, alphabetical shelves, Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son, each one stitched into his own private coat, together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.

  BILLY COLLINS
  AlphabeticalBookCountryNightPeopleShelvesSon
• 

  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
• 

  The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.

  BILLY COLLINS
  MindPaperRelieveTrained