18 Elizabeth Bishop Quotes

Elizabeth Bishop quotes

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

2. 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.

3. 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?

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

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

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

1. Hoping to live days of greater happiness, I forget that days of less happiness are passing by.

2. Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.)

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

4. 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'.

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

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

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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?

12. 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.