Billy Collins Quotes

There the door is always open into the “holy” — growth, birth, death.

Life is a green madness just now, trying to squeeze the last bit of warmth from the season.

Age overtakes us all; Our temples first; then on o'er cheek and chin, Slowly and surely, creep the frosts of Time. Up and do somewhat, ere thy limbs are sere.

I keep moving through time and time keeps moving through me. And through that process, life takes shape. The question is what shape it is. I'm not the first person to ask that question, or to see how absurd it is to think there's a real answer. Maybe life's a circle.

Time is a kind friend, he will make us old.

We do not ask to be born; and we do not ask to die. But born we are and die we must. We come into existence and we pass out of existence. And in neither case does high-handed fate await our ratification of its decree.

Life is made up of a series of moments, each one a journey to the end.

All human beings are like travelers floating down the eternal river of time, embarking at a certain point and disembarking again at another point in order to make room for others waiting below the river to come aboard.

The damps of autumn sink into the leaves and prepare them for the necessity of their fall; and thus insensibly are we, as years close around us, detached from our tenacity of life by the gentle pressure of recorded sorrow.

think of it this way," he said "It took nine months to get you born, so doesn't it figure it would take nine months to get you dead?

He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.

Death is the destination we all share, no one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be because death is very likely the single best invention of life.

One day you are drinking the wine, and they next day you are picking the grapes.

The hour which gives us life begins to take it away.

Time flies apace-we would fain believe that everything flies forward with it.

None of us are what we once were.

I thought that we were all like trees, flexible youths, saplings, who grow up heavy and stiff, spread seeds and get chopped down and turned into notebook paper.

To most the end comes as naturally and simply as sleep.

Age is such a natural progression you shouldn't fight it.

I have great faith in a seed.

A hundred years from now? All new people.

Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.

The longest Day hath an Eueninge.

Death, like birth, is one of nature's mysteries, the combining of primal elements and dissolving of the same into the same.

Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup. The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.