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Elizabeth Bishop Quotes

1911–1979 United States

Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979) was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1956.

United States
20th-century poets
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Poets

Random Elizabeth Bishop quote

22 quotes

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

North & South (1946)

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

North & South (1946)

Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?

Questions of Travel (1965)

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

Questions of Travel (1965)

The ancient owls' nest must have burned.
Hastily, all alone,
a glistening armadillo left the scene,
rose-flecked, head down, tail down.

Questions of Travel (1965)

From Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning,
please come flying.

Poems: North & South—A Cold Spring (1955)

The staring sailor
that shakes his watch
that tells the time
of the poet, the man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.

Questions of Travel (1965)

And Friday, my dear Friday, died of measles
seventeen years ago come March.

Geography III (1976)

Life and the memory of it so compressed
they've turned into each other.

Geography III (1976)

Icebergs behoove the soul
(both being self-made from elements least visible)
to see them so: fleshed, fair, erected, indivisible.

North & South (1946)

I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened.

Geography III (1976)

Topography displays no favorites; North's as near as West.
More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors.

North & South (1946)

This iceberg cuts its facets from within.
Like jewelry from a grave
it saves itself perpetually and adorns
Only itself.

North & South (1946)

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals...

Poems: North & South—A Cold Spring (1955)

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.

Geography III (1976)

Home-made, home-made! But aren’t we all?

Geography III (1976)

It is like 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.

Poems: North & South—A Cold Spring (1955)

Until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.

North & South (1946)

Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans […]
Somebody loves us all.

Questions of Travel (1965)

How had I come to be here
like them, and overhear
a cry of pain that could have
got loud and worse but hadn’t?

Geography III (1976)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Elizabeth Bishop (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.