Top 30 Elizabeth Bishop Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.”

— Elizabeth Bishop

2. “Oh, must we dream our dreams and have them, too?”

— Elizabeth Bishop

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

— Elizabeth Bishop

4. “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.”

— Elizabeth Bishop

5. “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.”

— Elizabeth Bishop

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

— Elizabeth Bishop

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

— Elizabeth Bishop

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

— Elizabeth Bishop

9. “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.”

— Elizabeth Bishop

10. “Someone loves us all.”

— Elizabeth Bishop

11. “You are you and you are going to be YOU forever.”

— Elizabeth Bishop

12. “I’ve never written the things I’d like to write that I’ve admired all my life. Maybe one never does.”

— Elizabeth Bishop

13. “All the untidyactivity continues, awful but cheerful.”

— Elizabeth Bishop

14. “The pigs stuck out their little feet and snored.”

— Elizabeth Bishop

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

— Elizabeth Bishop

16. “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.”

— Elizabeth Bishop

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

— Elizabeth Bishop

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

— Elizabeth Bishop

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

— Elizabeth Bishop

20. “Everything only connected by “and” and “and.”

— Elizabeth Bishop

21. “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?”

— Elizabeth Bishop

22. “Heaven is not like flying or swimming, but has something to do with blackness and a strong glare.”

— Elizabeth Bishop

Featured in: Strong Quotes

23. “Since we do float on an unknown sea, I think we should examine the other floating things that come our way carefully; who knows what may depend on it?”

— Elizabeth Bishop

24. “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?”

— Elizabeth Bishop

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

25. “Ports are necessities, like postage stamps or soap, but they seldom seem to care what impressions they make.”

— Elizabeth Bishop

26. “There are some people whom we envy not because they are rich or handsome or successful, although they may be all or any of these, but because everything they are or do seems to be all of a piece, so that even if they wanted to they could not be or do otherwise.”

— Elizabeth Bishop

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

— Elizabeth Bishop

28. “Something needn’t be large to be good.”

— Elizabeth Bishop

29. “If they should say you have no sense, don’t you mind them; it won’t make much difference. Lullaby.”

— Elizabeth Bishop

30. “Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs – no regular hours, so many temptations!”

— Elizabeth Bishop

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

— Elizabeth Bishop

32. “I believe in the oblique, the indirect approach and I keep my feelings to myself.”

— Elizabeth Bishop

33. “Sleep on and on, war’s over soon. Drop the silly, harmless toy, pick up the moon. Lullaby.”

— Elizabeth Bishop