Elizabeth Bishop Quotes

51 Sourced Quotes

The armored cars of dreams contrived to let us do
so many a dangerous thing.

Elizabeth Bishop
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. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Elizabeth Bishop
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?

Elizabeth Bishop
Sometimes it seems... as though only intelligent people are stupid enough to fall in love & only stupid people are intelligent enough to let themselves be loved.

Elizabeth Bishop
Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove and the child draws another inscrutable house.

Elizabeth Bishop
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 [...], some intimate, low-voiced, and delicate things in our mostly huge and roaring, glaring world?

Elizabeth Bishop
From a magician's midnight sleeve
the radio-singers
distribute all their love-songs
over the dew-wet lawns.

Elizabeth Bishop
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals...

Elizabeth Bishop
Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs — no regular hours, so many temptations!

Elizabeth Bishop
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?

Elizabeth Bishop
Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop
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 fall. The spangled sea below wants me to fall. It is hard as diamonds; it wants to destroy us all.

Elizabeth Bishop
The state with the prettiest name,
the state that floats in brackish water,
held together by mangrove roots.

Elizabeth Bishop
It was cold and windy, scarcely the day to take a walk on that long beach Everything was withdrawn as far as possible, indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken, seabirds in ones or twos. The rackety, icy, offshore wind numbed our faces on one side; disrupted the formation of a lone flight of Canada geese; and blew back the low, inaudible rollers in upright, steely mist.

Elizabeth Bishop
Her face is closed as a nut,
closed as a careful snail
or a thousand-year-old seed.

Elizabeth Bishop
The staring sailor that shakes his watch that tells the time of the poet, the man that lies in the house of Bedlam.

Elizabeth Bishop
Think of the long trip home. Should we have stayed home and thought of here? Where should we be today?

Elizabeth Bishop
There are some people whom we envy not because they are rich or handsome or successful, although they may be all or any of these, but because everything they are or do seems to be all of a piece, so that even if they wanted to they could not be or do otherwise.

Elizabeth Bishop
Democracy in the contemporary world demands, among other things, an educated and informed people.

Elizabeth Bishop
The big fish tubs are completely lined
with layers of beautiful herring scales
and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered
with creamy iridescent coats of mail,
with small iridescent flies crawling on them.

Elizabeth Bishop
When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.

Elizabeth Bishop
I am sorry for people who can't write letters. But I suspect also that you and I…love to write them because it's kind of like working without really doing it.

Elizabeth Bishop
How had I come to be here like them, and overhear a cry of pain that could have got loud and worse but hadn't?

Elizabeth Bishop
Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts
held us all together
or made us all just one?

Elizabeth Bishop
The short, half-tone scale of winter weathers
is a spread pigeon's wing.
Winter lives under a pigeon's wing, a dead wing with damp feathers.

Elizabeth Bishop