Elizabeth Bishop Quotes

51 Sourced Quotes

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
Topography displays no favorites; North's as near as West.
More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors.

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It was cold and windy, scarcely the day to take a walk on that long beach Everything was withdrawn as far as possible, indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken, seabirds in ones or twos.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
I'd have
nightmares of other islands stretching away from mine, infinities of islands, islands spawning islands like frogs' eggs turning into polliwogs
of islands, knowing that I had to live on each and every one, eventually, for ages, registering their flora, their fauna, their geography.

Elizabeth Bishop
—Yesterday brought to today so lightly!
(A yesterday I find almost impossible to lift.)

Elizabeth Bishop
From Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning, please come flying.

Elizabeth Bishop
Should we have stayed at home, wherever that may be?

Elizabeth Bishop
I was made at right angles to the world and I see it so. I can only see it so.

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

Elizabeth Bishop
Until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go.

Elizabeth Bishop
Once more I am overcome by my own amazing sloth and unmannerliness. Can you please forgive me and believe that it is really because I want to do something well that I don't do it at all?

Elizabeth Bishop
Think of the storm roaming the sky uneasily
like a dog looking for a place to sleep in,
listen to it growling.

Elizabeth Bishop
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.

Elizabeth Bishop
"Fun"—it always seemed to leave you at a loss.

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
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
—And Friday, my dear Friday, died of measles seventeen years ago come March.

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

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

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