Quotations

"Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from."

— Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, English composer, born 1875

"The most happy marriage I can picture or imagine to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman."

— Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, English composer, born 1875

"All thoughts, all passions, all delights, whatever stirs this mortal frame, all are but ministers of Love and feed His sacred flame."

— Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, English composer, born 1875

"To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illuminate only the track it has passed."

— Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, English composer, born 1875

"Advice is like snow; the softer it falls the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into the mind."

— Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, English composer, born 1875

"Brute animals have the vowel sounds; man only can utter consonants."

— Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, English composer, born 1875

"We are the creature of language, and through language we affirm ourselves."

— Robert Coles, American psychologist, born 1929

"I sit in the dark and wait for a little flame to appear at the end of my pencil."

— Billy Collins, American poet, born 1941

"Death is what makes life fun."

— Billy Collins, American poet, born 1941

"You come by your style by learning what to leave out. At first you tend to overwrite—embellishment instead of insight. You either continue to write puerile bilge, or you change. In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice."

— Billy Collins, American poet, born 1941

"While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane."

— Billy Collins, American poet, born 1941

"Introduction to Poetry I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem's room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author's name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means."

— Billy Collins, American poet, born 1941

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

— Billy Collins, American poet, born 1941

"The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper."

— Billy Collins, American poet, born 1941