Quote Of The Day By Billy Collins: 'There Are Worse Practices Than Spending Your...'

Poetry more often than not involves reaching for the sublime and weaving together metaphor and imagery to explain the human experience. Billy Collins, one of the most successful poets in American history, changed that rule by embracing the mundane, using humor and conversational language to find wonder in the most ordinary of moments. One of his poems questions why a dog suddenly decides to move from one room to another, because when you look closely enough, there's a little mystery in everything. 

Collins was born in Manhattan in 1941, in the same hospital where, coincidentally, fellow poet William Carlos Williams had worked before. Though his first poem came at 12, his road to pursuing poetry was a winding one. Collins earned his doctorate and spent decades teaching literature. Though he'd already put out work, "The Apple That Astonished Paris" was the collection that brought him wider recognition, published in his late 40s.

Part of that delay was apparently self-inflicted. The poet has admitted that he spent his early years performing a sadness he didn't feel, and that seemed to be the job. "I knew that poets seemed to be miserable," he told PBS NewsHour in 2013. "I was a pretty happy kid ... I had to fake it." He found his footing when he let that pose go and started to incorporate humor into his poetry. His 2025 collection "Dog Show" once again gave him a subject he'd been circling his whole life, which his why Billy Collins is the author behind today's quote of the day.

Billy Collins wrote: "Clearly, there are worse practices / than spending your time following a dog / whichever way she may roam / into the woods or across a stream."

The line comes from "The Following Dogs," a poem in "Dog Show," which Random House put out on November 18, 2025. The collection has 25 poems and carries a dedication to 85 individual dogs. In the poem, Collins describes the importance of being able to follow a dog. This poem about dogs is, in fact, about the purpose of life, or at least the purpose humans assign to it.

The message sitting at the heart of the poem, and this line in particular, is about giving up control. Following the dog means surrendering the steering wheel for an hour and allowing life's little adventures to play out. The American poet is grading the activity of following a dog from below. He doesn't call the action restorative, or joyful, or good for the soul. The implication is that when it comes down to it, there are worse things you could be doing. We are obsessed with finding purpose and pursuing ambition, but perhaps a good life is about following a dog with no grand objective. At least for a little while.

The ambitious path is fraught with danger, because when you start to lead, when you begin to make decisions and think decisively about matters such as fate and future, you begin to take things more seriously than you should. Fanaticism is the purpose-driven life in its most extreme form. What the dog offers isn't a better cause, but rather a retreat to gain some perspective. 

• "Poetry is a language that means more and sounds better than other written expressions."
• "Another motto I hold dear is 'If at first you don't succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried.'"
• "It seems only yesterday I used to believe / there 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.
• "The way the dog trots out the front door / every morning / without a hat or an umbrella, / without any money / or the keys to her dog house ... Who provides a finer example / of a life without encumbrance?"
• " ... 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."