Top 50 Elizabeth Bishop Quotes
#1. Topography displays no favorites; North's as near as West.
More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors.
Elizabeth Bishop
#4. I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.
Elizabeth Bishop
#5. Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.
Elizabeth Bishop
#7. Icebergs behoove the soul (both being self-made from elements least visible) to see themselves: fleshed, fair, erected, indivisible.
Elizabeth Bishop
#10. 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
#11. I was made at right angles to the world
and I see it so. I can only see it so.
Elizabeth Bishop
#12. Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.)
Elizabeth Bishop
#13. All my life i have lived and behaved very much like the sandpiper just running down the edges of different countries and continents, looking for something.
Elizabeth Bishop
#14. Since we do float on an unknown sea, I think we should examine the other floating things that come our way carefully; who knows what may depend on it?
Elizabeth Bishop
#15. Ports are necessities, like postage stamps or soap, but they seldom seem to care what impressions they make.
Elizabeth Bishop
#16. 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 around?
Elizabeth Bishop
#17. The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seemed filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster
Elizabeth Bishop
#18. Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs
no regular hours, so many temptations!
Elizabeth Bishop
#20. One has to commit a painting,' said Degas,
'the way one commits a crime.
Elizabeth Bishop
#22. Well, the cat is flourishing and gets more spoiled and more beautiful every day. His whiskers measure, from tip to tip, including his mouth and nose, of course, ten inches, pure white whale bone.
Elizabeth Bishop
#24. 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
#25. 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
#27. 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 every ridiculous sentence of the way. How can they let him do it?
Elizabeth Bishop
#28. Hoping to live days of greater happiness, I forget that days of less happiness are passing by.
Elizabeth Bishop
#29. Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
esso - so - so - so
to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.
Elizabeth Bishop
#30. I've never written the things I'd like to write that I've admired all my life. Maybe one never does.
Elizabeth Bishop
#32. How - I didn't know any
word for it - how "unlikely" ...
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
#33. 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
#34. Democracy in the contemporary world demands, among other things, an educated and informed people.
Elizabeth Bishop
#35. Sometimes it seemsas though only intelligent people are stupid enough to fall in love & only stupid people are intelligent enough to let themselves be loved.
Elizabeth Bishop
#36.
Even losing you (a 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
#37. Heaven is not like flying or swimming, but has something to do with blackness and a strong glare.
Elizabeth Bishop
#38. 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 - and the same goes for paintings.
Elizabeth Bishop
#39. Love's the son
stood stammering elocution
while the poor ship in flames went down
Elizabeth Bishop
#40. 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
#42. It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free.
Elizabeth Bishop
#44. The armored cars of dreams, contrived to let us do so many a dangerous thing.
Elizabeth Bishop
#45. 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
#46. Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!
O falling fire and piercing cry
and panic, and a weak mailed fist
clenched ignorant against the sky!
Elizabeth Bishop
#47. And as to experience-well, think how little some good poets have had, or how much some bad ones have.
Elizabeth Bishop
#49. 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
#50. 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 that I don't do it at all?
Elizabeth Bishop
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