Elizabeth Bishop Quotes

35 quotes in 601 categories

• All my life I have lived and behaved very much like the sandpiper - just running down the edges of different countries and continents, 'looking…
• The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
• What childishness is it that while there's breath of life in our bodies, we are determined to rush to see the sun the other way…
• And as to experience-well, think how little some good poets have had, or how much some bad ones have.
• Democracy in the contemporary world demands, among other things, an educated and informed people.
• The armored cars of dreams, contrived to let us do so many a dangerous thing.
• Hoping to live days of greater happiness, I forget that days of less happiness are passing by.
• Why shouldn't we, so generally addicted to the gigantic, at last have some small works of art, some short poems, short pieces of music [...],…
• Icebergs behoove the soul (both being self-made from elements least visible) to see themselves: fleshed, fair, erected, indivisible.
• The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
• I HATED the Salinger story. It took me days to go through it, gingerly, a page at a time, and blushing with embarrassment for him…
• Sometimes it seemsas though only intelligent people are stupid enough to fall in love & only stupid people are intelligent enough to let themselves be…
• What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.
• I've never written the things I'd like to write that I've admired all my life. Maybe one never does.
• I am overcome by my own amazing sloth...Can you please forgive me and believe that it is really because I want to do something well…
• Bishop on "At the Fishhouses"At the last minute, after I'd had a chance to do a little research in Cape Breton, I foundI'd said codfish…
• It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free.
• The pigs stuck out their little feet and snored.
• Ports are necessities, like postage stamps or soap, but they seldom seem to care what impressions they make.
• But he sleeps on the top of his mast with his eyes closed tight. The gull inquired into his dream, which was, "I must not…

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