Billy Collins Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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Humor disarms people. It opens them up to starting a dialogue about things they wouldn't normally talk about. I don't understand how people who don't have a sense of humor get through life.
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There definitely will be flying cars, but whether there'll be flying cars for most people to use, it'll probably take a long time to straighten everything out, all the rules and hassles. It'll take a while to figure out how to keep people from crashing into each other.
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Begin noticing and being careful about keeping your imagination free of thoughts that you do not wish to materialize. Instead, initiate a practice of filling your creative thoughts to overflow with ideas and wishes that you fully intend to manifest. Honor your imaginings regardless of others seeing them as crazy or impossible.
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I suspect that one of capitalism's crucial assets derives from the fact that the imagination of economists, including its critics, lags well behind its own inventiveness, the arbitrariness of its undertaking and the ruthlessness of the way in which it proceeds.
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I'm not so sure I believe in dopplegangers. I just prefer to be Dane DeHaan.
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I had the good fortune of having a happy, closely knit family.
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We have gone through everything as a nation - partition, dictatorship, and even anarchy.
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A bad hair day for me is when it gets flat and greasy.
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The mind is a monkey, hopping around from thought to thought, image to image. Rarely do more than a few seconds go by in which the mind can remain single-pointed, empty.
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I told my agent which women I aspire to have a career like: Frances McDormand, Kate Winslet, Laura Linney and Emma Thompson - character actresses who have something to say. I also said that I loved Madeline Kahn and Jessica Lange.
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The secularists in Turkey haven't underestimated religion, they just made the mistake of believing they could control it with the power of the army alone.
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I'm a strong proponent of green tech for anyone who can afford it, having spent the last 40 years working toward achieving a smaller and smaller eco-impact for myself.
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We live on a planet that is amazing, beautiful, and full of wonder but not protected from powerful destructive forces of nature. We are capable of doing wonderful and selfless things but also self-absorbed and harmful things. This is the world we live in.
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The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age, at which point early retirement ensures that we lack the means or the will to enforce significant change.
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If you can believe it, I had no intentions of being a wrestler.
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No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found.
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Many men of genius must arise before a particular man of genius can appear.
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The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Many of those people deserve to be in prison; however, some of them do not.
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What to leave out is the first thing the artist has to decide; a painter who 'held the mirror up to nature' would spend his life on the leaves of one landscape. The work of art’s fluctuating and idiosyncratic threshold of attention-the great things disregarded, the small things seized and dwelt on-is as much of a signature as anything in it.
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People tend to pay too little attention to history - the history of Silicon Valley and American business - and think they're the first people to come across a problem.
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Nobody ever worked as hard as my father. My father averaged maybe four hours of sleep at night, and when you're a kid, you don't realize that.
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The room smelled like a gust of wind from Satan's anus.
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Touching his hair, she leaned hesitantly forward, and he folded his arms around her, sinking into sensation again as they kissed--the slight weight of her on his lap, the smell of her. He glided his hands up the warm dip of her spine, felt her shiver and press closer. He could never get enough of this. Never.
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I'm an only child, and I can take all the attention you manage to pile on me.