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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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  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
• 

  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
• 

  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 think more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes cartoons.

  BILLY COLLINS
  BrotherCartoonCreativityThinkingWordsworth
• 

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

  BILLY COLLINS
  BoundariesInsanityLand
• 

  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
• 

  I don’t know if anyone’s reading it, but poets are still flying around the country going from lectern to lectern.That circuitry has become very well-established.

  BILLY COLLINS
  AnyoneCountryEstablishedGoingLectern
• 

  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
• 

  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 see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness.

  BILLY COLLINS
  KindObscureRudeness
• 

  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
• 

  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
• 

  The literary world is so full of pretension, and there’s such an enormous gap between how seriously poets take themselves and how widely they’re ignored by everybody else.

  BILLY COLLINS
  GapsIgnoredPoetThemselvesWorld
• 

  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
• 

  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