• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

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

Marilyn Monroe Paulo Coelho Abraham Lincoln C. S. Lewis Khalil Gibran Charlie Chaplin Gautama Buddha Isaac Newton

Prevoius|

More Billy Collins Quotes

• 

  I was a pretty happy kid, I had to fake it. I had to get into this miserable character before I wrote poems.

  BILLY COLLINS
  CharacterHappy KidKids
• 

  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 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
  DistractionLeftPathRightThinking
• 

  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
• 

  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
• 

  I could look at you forever and never see the two of us together

  BILLY COLLINS
  ForeverTogetherTwo
• 

  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
• 

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

  BILLY COLLINS
  AbleHumorousSilly
• 

  Death is what makes life fun.

  BILLY COLLINS
  DeathFun Life
• 

  But my heart is always propped up in a field on its tripod, ready for the next arrow.

  BILLY COLLINS
  ArrowsFieldsHeart
• 

  I was an only child, a very late child, born to parents who were both 39 at the time, which was very late back then. That kind of confirmed my sense of being the center of the universe, which I guess every child feels – children and poets both tend to feel.

  BILLY COLLINS
  ChildChildrenOnlyParent
• 

  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
• 

  High School is the place where poetry goes to die.

  BILLY COLLINS
  DiesHighSchool
• 

  My poems could easily evaporate. So I don’t know. If you find yourself as a writer thinking about posterity you should probably go out for a brisk walk or something.

  BILLY COLLINS
  PoemPosteritySomethingThinkingWalk
• 

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

  BILLY COLLINS
  HeartNamesWall
• 

  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