Elizabeth Bishop Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs--no regular hours, so many temptations!”
-- Elizabeth Bishop -
“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 -
“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.”
-- 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—and the same goes for paintings.”
-- Elizabeth Bishop -
“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 -
“It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free.”
-- Elizabeth Bishop -
“And as to experience-well, think how little some good poets have had, or how much some bad ones have.”
-- Elizabeth Bishop -
“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.”
-- Elizabeth Bishop -
“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 -
“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 -
“Topography displays no favorites; North's as near as West. More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors.”
-- Elizabeth Bishop -
“The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.”
-- Elizabeth Bishop -
“Icebergs behoove the soul (both being self-made from elements least visible) to see themselves: fleshed, fair, erected, indivisible.”
-- Elizabeth Bishop -
“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 -
“I've never written the things I'd like to write that I've admired all my life. Maybe one never does.”
-- Elizabeth Bishop -
“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 -
“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 -
“The pigs stuck out their little feet and snored.”
-- Elizabeth Bishop -
“Ports are necessities, like postage stamps or soap, but they seldom seem to care what impressions they make.”
-- Elizabeth Bishop -
“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 -
“Bishop on "At the Fishhouses"At the last minute, after I'd had a chance to do a little research in Cape Breton, I foundI'd said codfish scales once when it should have been herring scales. I hope theycorrected it all right.2Quite a few lines of "At the Fishhouses" came to me in a dream, and the scene- whichwas real enough, I'd recently been there-but the old man and the conversation, etc.,were all in a later dream”
-- Elizabeth Bishop -
“Heaven is not like flying or swimming, but has something to do with blackness and a strong glare.”
-- Elizabeth Bishop -
“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 -
“Hoping to live days of greater happiness, I forget that days of less happiness are passing by.”
-- Elizabeth Bishop -
“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 -
“Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.)”
-- Elizabeth Bishop -
“Dreams were the worst. Of course I dreamed of food and love, but they were pleasant rather than otherwise. But then I'd dream of things like slitting a baby's throat, mistaking it for a baby goat. I'd have nightmares of other islands stretching away from mine, infinities of islands, islands spawning islands, like frogs' eggs turning into polliwogs of islands, knowing that I had to live on each and every one, eventually, for ages, registering their flora, their fauna, their geography.”
-- Elizabeth Bishop -
“I was made at right angles to the world and I see it so. I can only see it so.”
-- Elizabeth Bishop -
“The art of losing isn't hard to master.”
-- Elizabeth Bishop
