Elizabeth Bishop Quotes
Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs--no regular hours, so many temptations!
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Democracy in the contemporary world demands, among other things, an educated and informed people.
Hoping to live days of greater happiness, I forget that days of less happiness are passing by.
Heaven is not like flying or swimming, but has something to do with blackness and a strong glare.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Icebergs behoove the soul (both being self-made from elements least visible) to see themselves: fleshed, fair, erected, indivisible.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free.
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.
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.
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?
And as to experience-well, think how little some good poets have had, or how much some bad ones have.
Ports are necessities, like postage stamps or soap, but they seldom seem to care what impressions they make.
I've never written the things I'd like to write that I've admired all my life. Maybe one never does.
Topography displays no favorites; North's as near as West. More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors.
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?
Time to plant tears, says the almanac. The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove and the child draws another inscrutable house.
Think of the long trip home. Should we have stayed home and thought of here? Where should we be today?
Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.)
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.
Love's the sonstood stammering elocutionwhile the poor ship in flames went down
How—I didn't know anyword for it—how "unlikely". . .How had I come to be here, like them, and overheara cry of pain that could havegot loud and worse but hadn't?
One has to commit a painting, ' said Degas, 'the way one commits a crime.
Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!O falling fire and piercing cryand panic, and a weak mailed fistclenched ignorant against the sky!
