List of Elizabeth Bishop Quotes

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

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?

The Pigs Stuck Out Their Little Feet And Snored.

Topography Displays No Favorites; North's As Near As West. More Delicate Than The Historians' Are The Map-makers' Colors.

Ports Are Necessities, Like Postage Stamps Or Soap, But They Seldom Seem To Care What Impressions They Make.

Icebergs Behoove The Soul (both Being Self-made From Elements Least Visible) To See Themselves: Fleshed, Fair, Erected, Indivisible.

The Art Of Losing Isn't Hard To Master.

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.

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.

Open The Book. (the Gilt Rubs Off The Edges Of The Pages And Pollinates The Fingertips.)

It Was Cold And Windy, Scarcely The Day To Take A Walk On That Long Beach Everything Was Withdrawn As Far As Possible, Indrawn: The Tide Far Out, The Ocean Shrunken, Seabirds In Ones Or Twos.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.

And As To Experience-well, Think How Little Some Good Poets Have Had, Or How Much Some Bad Ones Have.