Welcome to our collection of quotes by Elizabeth Bishop. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979) was an American poet and short-story writer. She was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1949 to 1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956, the National Book Award winner in 1970, and the recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976. Dwight Garner argued that she was perhaps "the most purely gifted poet of the 20th century."
The state with the prettiest name, the state that floats in brackish water, held together by mangrove roots.
All the untidyactivity continues, awful but cheerful.
All the untidy activity continues, awful but cheerful.
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
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.
It is what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.).
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.
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.
What the Man-Moth fears most he must do.
Hoping to live days of greater happiness, I forget that days of less happiness are passing by.
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?
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.
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.
Ports are necessities, like postage stamps or soap, but they seldom seem to care what impressions they make.
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.
Topography displays no favorites; North's as near as West.
More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors.
Heaven is not like flying or swimming, but has something to do with blackness and a strong glare.
Insomnia perhaps she's a daytime sleeper.
Sometimes it seemsas though only intelligent people are stupid enough to fall in love and only stupid people are intelligent enough to let themselves be loved.
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.
The pigs stuck out their little feet and snored.
The armored cars of dreams, contrived to let us do so many a dangerous thing.
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.
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?
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
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'.