Billy Collins Quotes
For most Americans, poetry plays no role in their everyday lives. But also for most Americans, contemporary painting or jazz or sculpture play no role either. I'm not saying poetry is singled out as a special thing to ignore.
Quotes to Explore
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I am enjoying my face changing, as well as realizing that at the same time, as you get older, the machine isn't as well-oiled as it was.
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I clearly believe a lot more than some of my coalition colleagues - Tories - in redistribution and using the tax system for that purpose. I also believe in the government having an active role in the economy, which is having an industrial strategy. I'm not a believer in laissez-faire.
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Being American and being an outsider at the same time, it's a perspective I often bring to a character.
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I despise making the most of one's time. Half of the pleasures of life consist of the opportunities one has neglected.
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I've always been extremely physical. I was a gymnast for 15 years, and then I was a dancer for nine, so I was kind of looking for these parts. But we have a tendency in Denmark not to do many action films.
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When I learned that flour pound for pound has as many calories as sugar, and that when eating pasta you're basically eating cake, I was size 23, and my neck was restricting my breathing, and so I got on a microbiotic diet and got myself an exercise bike.
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The choice that frees or imprisons us is the choice of love or fear. Love liberates. Fear imprisons.
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I wasn't interested at all in doing a documentary. I was not a public figure.
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When people laugh at Mickey Mouse, it's because he's so human; and that is the secret of his popularity.
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My grandpa would come in with water and flick it on our faces at 6 A.M. and be like, 'If you don't get up to feed the horses, you don't get to ride them.' We'd get up.
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Pete Seeger is a modest, unassuming, cheerful, and kind-natured man. He's a good folk singer, if you can stand folk singing. And he's such an excellent banjo player that you almost don't wish you had a pair of wire cutters.
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There are actors who aren't on the cover of magazines but still decide what work they want and when they want it. I want a family one day. So I dream of really being able to decide when to work and when not to.
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Americans have grown impatient with the relentless politicizing of every area of life.
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I sang for my family. And I think probably the first time I sang and got paid for it, I was about 6 or 7.
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As far as expectations go, you can never work for expectations. You have to work against them.
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There are certain things that can be asked that get me excited. It's never a thing where I think I'm too good, I'm just the type of person who likes to be enlightened. I don't like to go through the motions.
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I'm not being outspoken or pro or con abortion.
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When ye are prepared for a thing, the opportunity to use it presents itself.
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Speaking much also is a sign of vanity; for he that is lavish in words is a niggard in deeds.
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I watched Arsenal in the Champions League the other week playing some of the best football I've ever seen and yet they couldn't have scored in a brothel with two grand in their pockets!
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Institutional Buddhism has been conspicuously ready to accept or ignore the inequalities and tyrannies of whatever political system it found itself under. This can be death to Buddhism, because it is death to any meaningful function of compassion.
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Not one of these nobly equipped young men has escaped the restless, exhausting, confusing, debilitating crisis of education. ... He feels that he cannot guide himself, cannot help himself—and then he dives hopelessly into the world of everyday life and daily routine, he is immersed in the most trivial activity possible, and his limbs grow weak and weary.
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For most Americans, poetry plays no role in their everyday lives. But also for most Americans, contemporary painting or jazz or sculpture play no role either. I'm not saying poetry is singled out as a special thing to ignore.
