Quotes from Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seemed filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster

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.

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.

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.

Oh, must we dream our dreams and have them, too?

Insomnia" perhaps she's a daytime sleeper.

I was made at right angles to the world and I see it so. I can only see it so.

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

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

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

Time to plant tears, says the almanac. The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove and the child draws another inscrutable house.

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 art of losing isn't hard to master.

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.

Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs--no regular hours, so many temptations!

One shouldn't get too involved with people who can't possibly understand one

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

All the untidy activity continues, awful but cheerful.

what the Man-Moth fears most he must do..

Is it right to be watching strangers in a play / in this strangest of theatres? / 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?

I knew that nothing stranger had ever happened, that nothing stranger could ever happen.

Even losing you (a 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.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac. The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove and the child draws another inscrutable house.

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?