Elizabeth Bishop Quotes
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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
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I was made at right angles to the world and I see it so. I can only see it so.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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Think of the long trip home. Should we have stayed home and thought of here? Where should we be today?
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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?
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The pigs stuck out their little feet and snored.
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Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs--no regular hours, so many temptations!
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Heaven is not like flying or swimming, but has something to do with blackness and a strong glare.
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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.
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Icebergs behoove the soul (both being self-made from elements least visible) to see themselves: fleshed, fair, erected, indivisible.
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I've never written the things I'd like to write that I've admired all my life. Maybe one never does.
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Oh, must we dream our dreams and have them, too?
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The armored cars of dreams, contrived to let us do so many a dangerous thing.
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I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook fast in a corner of his mouth. He didn't fight. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I stared and stared and victory filled up the little rented boat from the pool of bilge where oil had spread a rainbow around the rusted engine to the bailer rusted orange, the sun-cracked thwarts the oarlocks on their strings, the gunnels-until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go.
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It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free.
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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'.
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Topography displays no favorites; North's as near as West. More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors.
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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.
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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.
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The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
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It was cold and windy, scarcely the day to take a walk on that long beach Everything was withdrawn as far as possible, indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken, seabirds in ones or twos. The rackety, icy, offshore wind numbed our faces on one side; disrupted the formation of a lone flight of Canada geese; and blew back the low, inaudible rollers in upright, steely mist.
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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.
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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.
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All the untidyactivity continues, awful but cheerful.
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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.
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Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master.
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Hoping to live days of greater happiness, I forget that days of less happiness are passing by.
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Ports are necessities, like postage stamps or soap, but they seldom seem to care what impressions they make.
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