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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 try to presume that no one is interested in me. And I think experience bears that out. No one’s interested in the experiences of a stranger – let’s put it that way. And then you have difficulty combined with presumptuousness, which is the most dire trouble with poetry.

  BILLY COLLINS
  CombinedExperiencePoetryStranger
• 

  When I began to dare to be clear, because 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
  ComprehensibleExposedRealRiskSayingThinking
• 

  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 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
• 

  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
• 

  I thought I would be completely content if I was recognized at some later point in my life as a third-rate Wallace Stevens.

  BILLY COLLINS
  LifePeoplePoetPopularRecognizedThought
• 

  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
• 

  I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word accessible.

  BILLY COLLINS
  AccessiblePoemsThinkingUnderrated
• 

  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
• 

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

  BILLY COLLINS
  ArrowsFieldsHeart
• 

  The entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

  BILLY COLLINS
  DecidedHeardHemisphereMemoriesSouthernSuddenly
• 

  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
• 

  There are just long gaps where I can’t find a point of insertion, I can’t find a good opening line.

  BILLY COLLINS
  AirFallInsertionOpenTimeWriting
• 

  I’m a line-maker. I think that’s what makes poets different from prose-writers. That’s the main way. We think, not just in sentences the way prose writers do but also in lines. So we’re doing these two things at the same time.

  BILLY COLLINS
  DifferentThinkingTwo
• 

  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
• 

  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.

  BILLY COLLINS
  AwareStrangerThinkingTryingTwoWriting