Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

Someone loves us all.

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'.

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.

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

What the Man-Moth fears most he must do.

Democracy in the contemporary world demands, among other things, an educated and informed people.

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.

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

The pigs stuck out their little feet and snored.

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

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

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

And as to experience-well, think how little some good poets have had, or how much some bad ones have.