Elizabeth Bishop Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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I knew that nothing stranger had ever happened.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elizabeth Bishop