Billy Collins Quotes
I find that my reading, particularly nonfiction, can inspire a poem as well as anything else.
Quotes to Explore
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I saw a picture of Elvis in blue lame, and thought that if I could recreate that suit and walk down the King's Road in it, someone might pick me up and take me off on a crazy adventure.
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It is crucial that we develop real awareness of ourselves as citizens of Earth, linked by mutual and indissoluble bonds. When we clearly recognize this reality and ground ourselves in it, we are compelled to take a strict accounting of our way of life.
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There are really two kinds of optimism. There's the complacent, Pollyanna optimism that says, 'Don't worry - everything will be just fine,' and that allows one to just lay back and do nothing about the problems around you. Then there's what we call dynamic optimism. That's an optimism based on action.
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I own a Hangman jumper, which looks like a scarf, but that's what it's called. It cost a fortune, but it was worth it.
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We have been given a role to play. We have been asked to provide, to give lectures on the role of Islamic development and the way we do it here, so the people who are Muslims there would understand what the role of Islam is.
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I don't have any message in the music. Music will be fine as long as you take care of yourself.
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It's healthy to have interests besides books.
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I have never found out that there was in my family an artist or anyone interested in the arts or sciences, and I have never been sufficiently interested in my 'family tree' to bother. My father and mother had come to America on one of those great waves of immigration that followed persecution and pogroms in Czarist Russia and Poland.
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I had a moment where I left journalism, and I started getting interested in this issue and writing about it, where I felt there was a right side and a wrong side around a lot of these issues relating to education.
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I don't write under the ghost of Faulkner. I live in the same town and find his life and work inspiring, but that's it. I have a motorcycle and tool along the country lanes. I travel at my own speed.
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I sing to Jesus for Jesus now. This gives me pure joy... worship!
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I'm the little dog who goes the wrong way - under the hoop.
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Rock and Roll has no beginning and no end for it is the very pulse of life itself.
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A lasting architecture has to have roots.
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The older you get, the more comfortable you become with yourself, and you accept what you have physically.
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As a business person, I want the world to share the prosperity together.
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The whole borrowing clothes thing is very unnatural for me. I don't feel comfortable with that. If you like something, I'd just give it to you rather than sharing it.
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I have seen life from the top down and the bottom up. I know how it looks both ways. And I know there is wisdom and that there is hope.
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When I was diagnosed I didn't know how epidemic cancer was. You find out that everybody you know is touched by this disease.
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My hair is God's aura. Everything went up when I got home from the penitentiary. One night I went to lie down next to my wife, and my hair started popping and uncurling all on its own - ping, ping, ping, ping! I knew that it was God telling me to stay on the righteous path so he could one day pull me up to be there with him.
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In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.
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I think that I had read so much fiction that the craft itself sort of sank into me. I didn't read any 'how to' books or attend any popular-fiction-writing classes or have a critique group. For many years into my writing, I didn't even know another author. For me, a lot of reading was the best teacher.
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I find that my reading, particularly nonfiction, can inspire a poem as well as anything else.
