Elizabeth Bishop Quotes

51 Sourced Quotes

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

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
I knew that nothing stranger had ever happened.

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

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
Close, close all night the lovers keep. They turn together in their sleep, Close as two pages in a book that read each other in the dark. Each knows all the other knows, learned by heart from head to toes.

Elizabeth Bishop
I've never written the things I'd like to write that I've admired all my life. Maybe one never does.

Elizabeth Bishop
This iceberg cuts its facets from within.
Like jewelry from a grave
it saves itself perpetually and adorns
only itself.

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
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
Life and the memory of it cramped,
dim, on a piece of Bristol board.

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

Elizabeth Bishop
Are you aware an iceberg takes repose
with you, and when it wakes may pasture on your snows?

Elizabeth Bishop
If after I read a poem, the world looks like that poem for 24 hours or so, I'm sure it's a good one.

Elizabeth Bishop
His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied,
looking for something, something, something.
Poor bird, he is obsessed!
The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray, mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.

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

Elizabeth Bishop
The ancient owls' nest must have burned.
Hastily, all alone,
a glistening armadillo left the scene,
rose-flecked, head down, tail down

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

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
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

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
Icebergs behoove the soul
(both being self-made from elements least visible) to see them so: fleshed, fair, erected, indivisible.

Elizabeth Bishop
Heaven is not like flying or swimming, but has something to do with blackness and a strong glare.

Elizabeth Bishop
Nature repeats herself, or almost does: repeat, repeat, repeat, revise, revise, revise.

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
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
Ports are necessities, like postage stamps or soap,
but they seldom seem to care what impressions they make.

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

Elizabeth Bishop