If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.
John UpdikeRead
Billy Collins writes lovely poems. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides.
Interpretation
Billy Collins’ poetry captures the beauty of the world in unexpected ways.
This quote by John Updike highlights the unique qualities of Billy Collins' poetry, describing it as both beautiful and insightful. It emphasizes the ability of Collins' work to explore various dimensions of reality, making readers reconsider what they perceive and embrace the richness of existence through a fresh lens.
In practice
This quote can be used in a literary class to discuss the impact of poetry on perception.
If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.
Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of. _x000D_ _x000D_ Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.
But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.
The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on.
To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit.
She's got those big black eyes with plenty shiny white in them that makes them shine like brand new money and she knows what God gave women eyelashes for, too. Her hair is not what you might call straight. It's negro hair, but it's got a kind of white flavor. Like the piece of string out of a ham. It's not ham at all, but it's been around ham and got the flavor.
After all perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent.
Photography to the amateur is recreation, to the professional it is work, and hard work too, no matter how pleasurable it my be.
I write as if to save somebody’s life. Probably my own. Life is a kind of madness that death makes. Long live the dead because we live in them.
You have two kinds of shows on Broadway - revivals and the same kind of musicals over and over again, all spectacles. You get your tickets for 'The Lion King' a year in advance, and essentially a family comes as if to a picnic, and they pass on to their children the idea that that's what the theater is - a spectacular musical you see once a year, a stage version of a movie. It has nothing to do with theater at all. It has to do with seeing what is familiar. We live in a recycled culture.
Every man, and for stronger reasons, every artist, wants to be recognized. So do I.
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