Billy Collins · 192 pages
Rating: (11.8K votes)
“Vade Mecum
I want the scissors to be sharp
and the table perfectly level
when you cut me out of my life
and paste me in that book you always carry.”
― Billy Collins, quote from Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems
“But some nights, I must tell you,
I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep.
I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness.
I sing a love song as well as I can,
lost for a while in the home of the rain. ”
― Billy Collins, quote from Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems
“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, quote from Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems
“It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.”
― Billy Collins, quote from Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems
“This is the middle.
Things have had time to get complicated,
messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore...
This is the thick of things.
So much is crowded into the middle—
...too much to name, too much to think about.”
― Billy Collins, quote from Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems
“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, quote from Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems
“O Canada I have not forgotten you,
as I kneel in my canoe, beholding this vision
of a bookcase.
You are the paddle, the snowshoe, the cabin in the pines.
You are the moose in the clearing and the moosehead on
the wall.
You are the rapids, the propeller, the kerosene lamp.
You are the dust that coats the roadside berries.
But not only that,
you are the two boys with pails walking along that road.”
― Billy Collins, quote from Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems
“perhaps the answer is simply one:
one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,
a small jazz combo working in the background.
She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful
eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over
to glance at his watch because she has been dancing
forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.”
― Billy Collins, quote from Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems
“The whole idea of it makes me feel
Like I’m coming down with something,
Something worse than any stomach ache
Or the headaches I get from reading in bad light –
A kind of measles of the spirit
A mumps of the psyche,
A disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.
You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
But that is because you have forgotten
The perfect simplicity of being one
And the beautiful complexity introduced by two
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit
At four I was an Arabian wizard
I could make myself invisible
By drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a solider, at nine a prince.
But now I am mostly at the window
Watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
Against the side of my tree house,
And my bicycle never leaned against the garage
As it does today,
All the dark blue speed drained out of it.
This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
As I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imagry friends,
Time to turn the first big number.”
― Billy Collins, quote from Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems
“Now I sit down at the desk, ready to begin.
I am entirely pure: nothing but a skeleton at a typewriter.
I should mention that sometimes I leave my penis on.
I find it difficult to ignore the temptation.
Then I am a skeleton with a penis at a typewriter.”
― Billy Collins, quote from Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems
Billy Collins
Born place: in New York City, The United States
Born date March 22, 1941
See more on GoodReads
“Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss other people. Life's too short to worry about what other people do or don't do. Tend your own backyard, not theirs, because yours is the one you have to live in.”
― Sherrilyn Kenyon, quote from Infamous
“He told her that every one of her enemies, all the masters and overseers of her suffering, would be punished, if not in this world then the next, for justice may be slow and invisible, but it always renders its true verdict in the end.”
― Colson Whitehead, quote from The Underground Railroad
“In 1956 a series of books, articles, pamphlets, and other documents relating to Bérenger Saunière and the enigma of Rennes-le-Chateau began to appear in France.”
― Michael Baigent, quote from Holy Blood, Holy Grail
“he was keeping track of time. It was nearly two hours since he had last looked at his watch, but he knew what time it was to within about twenty seconds. It was an old skill, born of many long wakeful nights on active service. When you're waiting for something to happen, you close your body down like a beach house in winter and you let your mind lock onto the steady pace of the passing seconds. It's like suspended animation. It saves energy and it lifts the responsibility for your heartbeat away from your unconscious brain and passes it on to some kind of a hidden clock. Makes a huge black space for thinking in. But it keeps you just awake enough to be reach for whatever you need to be ready for. And it means you always know what time it is.”
― Lee Child, quote from Die Trying
“That's what Father and Mother are, thought Nafai. They stay together, not because of any gain, but because of the gift. Father doesn't stay with Mother because she is good for him, but rather because together they can do good for us, and for many others.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from The Memory of Earth
The Sot-Weed Factor
Mortal Coil
Winter Garden
The A.B.C. Murders
Pawn in Frankincense
FateBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
