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Book: Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems
Quotes of Book: Sailing Alone Around the Room:
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  1. Billy Collins _ Sailing Alone Around the Room:

    In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok you would never see him doing such a thing,tossing the dry snow over the mountainof his bare, round shoulder, his hair tied in a knot,a model of concentration.Sitting is more his speed, if that is the wordfor what he does, or does not do.Even the season is wrong for him.In all his manifestations, is it not warm and slightly humid?Is this not implied by his serene expression, that smile so wide it wraps itself around the waist of the universe?But here we are, working our way down the driveway.one shovelful at a time. We toss the light powder into the clean air.We feel the cold most on our faces.And with every heave we disappearand become lost to each otherin these sudden clouds of our own making, these fountain-bursts of snow. This is so much better than a sermon in church,I say out loud, bud Buddha keeps on shoveling.This is the true religion, the religion of snow,and sunlight and winter geese barking in the sky,I say, but he is too busy to hear meHe has thrown himself into shoveling snowas if it were the purpose of existence, as if the sign of a perfect life were a clear drivewayyou could back the car down easilyand drive off into the vanities of the worldwith a broken heater fan and a song on the radio.All morning long we work side by side, me with my commentaryand he is inside the generous pocket of his silence, until the house is nearly noonand the snow is piled high all around us;then, I hear him speak.After this, he asks, can we go inside and play cards?Certainly, I reply, and I will heat some milkand bring cups of hot chlorate to the tablewhile you shuffle the deck, and our boots stand dripping by the door.Aaah, says the Buddha, lifting his eyesand leaning for a moment on his shovelbefore he drives the fun blade againdeep into the glittering white snow.
    book-quote

  2. Billy Collins _ Sailing Alone Around the Room:

    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.
    book-quote

  3. Billy Collins _ Sailing Alone Around the Room:

    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.
    book-quoteageinggrowing-upgrowing-old

  4. Billy Collins _ Sailing Alone Around the Room:

    It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.
    book-quotelifethe-past

  5. Billy Collins _ Sailing Alone Around the Room:

    In the freakish pink and gray of dawn I tookhis death to bed with me and his death was my bedand in every corner of the room it hid from the light,and then it was the light of day and the next dayand all the days to follow, and it moved into the futurelike the sharp tip of a pen moving across an empty page.
    book-quote

  6. Billy Collins _ Sailing Alone Around the Room:

    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 beautifuleyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans overto glance at his watch because she has been dancingforever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.
    book-quoteeternity

  7. Billy Collins _ Sailing Alone Around the Room:

    O Canada I have not forgotten you,as I kneel in my canoe, beholding this visionof 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.
    book-quotepoetry

  8. Billy Collins _ Sailing Alone Around the Room:

    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.
    book-quotereadinglibraryliterature

  9. Billy Collins _ Sailing Alone Around the Room:

    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.
    book-quotelifelife-lessons

  10. Billy Collins _ Sailing Alone Around the Room:

    It seems only yesterday I used to believethere 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.
    book-quotegrowing-uppoetry

  11. Billy Collins _ Sailing Alone Around the Room:

    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
    book-quotereadingliteraturewords

  12. Billy Collins _ Sailing Alone Around the Room:

    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.
    book-quote
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