Billy Collins Quotes

For me, books have always been a way to feel less alone while being alone. Perhaps if I was depressed and isolated, just communicating with these authors through their sentences helped me.

I do, indeed, close my door at times and surrender myself to a book, but only because I can open the door again and see a human face looking at me.

One of the things reading does, it makes your loneliness manageable if you are an essentially lonely person.

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

Books support us in our solitude and keep us from being a burden to ourselves.

From an early age she had developed the art of being alone and generally preferred her own company to anyone else’s. She read books at enormous speed and judged them entirely on her ability to remove her from her material surroundings. In almost all the unhappiest days of her life she had been able to escape from her own inner world by living temporarily in someone else’s, and on the two or three occasions that she had been too upset to concentrate she had been desolate.

…Even the idea of a city never entered his mind. It was as if he had walked under the millimeter of haze just above the inked fibers of a map, that pure zone between land and chart, between distances and legends, between nature and storyteller. The place they had chosen to come to, to be their best selves, to be unconscious of ancestry. Here, apart from the sun compass and the odometer mileage, and the book, he was alone, his own invention. He knew during these times how the mirage worked, the fata morgana, for he was within it.

I lay on the bed and lost myself in stories. I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyways.

I don't know myself, what to do, where to go... I lie in the crack of a book for my comfort... it's what the world offers... please leave me alone to dream as I fancy.

I read a lot growing up. It was kind of my comfort, you know; I loved it. I love story. I love narrative. I was academic. I wasn't particularly athletic. I didn't make the drill team. I didn't go out for sports.

I give the fight up: let there be an end, a privacy, an obscure nook for me. I want to be forgotten even by God.

I don't really go out that much, if I'm honest. I'm quite a recluse. If I had my way, I'd probably be at home most of the time with a book and a cup of tea or glass of wine.

When I was growing up, the place I felt least alone was when I was reading.

When I was younger I used to lock myself in the bathroom and read in the dry tub.

I don't like to be alone, but I do cherish the moments that I'm alone with a good book.

For solace, I love a book that opens up my perspective.

Nobody knows me.

I learned to build bookshelves and brought books to my room, gathering them around me thickly. I read by day and into the night. I thought about perfectibility, and deism, and adjectives, and clouds, and the foxes, I locked my door, from the inside, and leaped from the roof and went to the woods, by day or darkness.

I would be at home reading, because I felt so disconnected from humanity.

When I read books it's to escape. It's so I don't have to talk to people.

This girl shivers and crawls under the covers with all her clothes on and falls into an overdue library book, a faerie story with rats and marrow and burning curses. The sentences build a fence around her, a Times Roman 10-point barricade, to keep the thorny voices in her head from getting too close.

But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence.

He was a very private person, and sometimes it seemed to me that he was no longer interested in the world or in other people... I got the feeling that Julián was living in the past, locked in his memories. Julián lived within himself, for his books and inside them - a comfortable prison of his own design." "You say this as if you envied him." "There are worse prisons than words.

He would go somewhere no one knew him, and he would sit in a library all day and read books and listen to people breathing.

Books were safer than other people anyway.