Quotes from Elizabeth Bishop

Something needn't be large to be good.

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

Think of the long trip home. Should we have stayed home and thought of here? Where should we be today?

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free.

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?

I've never written the things I'd like to write that I've admired all my life. Maybe one never does.

What the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Oh, must we dream our dreams and have them, too? And have we room for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

To the sagging wharf few ships could come. The population numbered two giants, an idiot, a dwarf.

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?

The state with the prettiest name, the state that floats in brackish water, held together by mangrove roots.

The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.

Enormous morning, ponderous, meticulous; gray light streaking each bare branch, each single twig, along one side, making another tree, of glassy veins.

I had a theory at that time that one should write down all one's dreams. That that was the way to write poetry. So I kept a notebook of my dreams and thought if you ate a lot of awful cheese at bedtime you'd have interesting dreams. I went to Vassar with a pot about this big--it did have a cover!--of Roquefort cheese that I kept in the bottom of my bookcase . . . I think everyone's given to eccentricities at that age. I've heard that at Oxford Auden slept with a revolver under his pillow.

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

The tumult in the heart keeps asking questions And then it stops and undertakes to answer In the same tone of voice.

I've never written the things I'd like to write that I've admired all my life. Maybe one never does.

At night the grackle Love will start To shriek and shrill, Nor will he once be still Till he has wide awake the backward heart. So selfish Love, Go hush; Feathers and claws take off Or seek some bush.

And if we Severinos are all the same in life, we die the same death, the same Severino death. The death of those who die of old age before thirty, of an ambuscade before twenty, of hunger a little daily.

—Yesterday brought to today so lightly!(A yesterday I find almost impossible to lift.)

"Fun"—it always seemed to leave you at a loss.

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,drawn from the cold hard mouthof the world, derived from the rocky breastsforever, flowing and drawn, and sinceour knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.