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It is important for the poet not to be emotional because you cannot see the world clearly with tears in your eyes.

— Billy Collins Interview with Kritya: In the Name of Poetry (2004)

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More quotes by Billy Collins

You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and — somehow — the wine.

But tonight, the lion of contentment
has placed a warm heavy paw on my chest.

The complexity of women's undergarments
in nineteenth-century America
is not to be waved off,
and I proceeded like a polar explorer
through clips, clasps, and moorings,
catches, straps, and whalebone stays,
sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.

Wars begin through greed and vanity and are continued through the insanity of nationalism in which the boundaries of a land replace God.

Interview with Kritya: In the Name of Poetry (2004)

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.

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Billy Collins (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.