Elizabeth Bishop

“The shadow of the crib makes an enormous cage.”

“If you should dip your hand in, your wrist would ache immediately, your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn.”

“I am feeling rather cheerful and have been for several days, for no particular reason.”

“Home-made, home-made! But aren't we all?”

“The tumult in the heart keeps asking questions.”

“The armored cars of dreams, contrived to let us do so many things we can't.”

“A cold spring: the violet was flawed on the lawn.”

“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'.”

“All the untidy activity continues, awful but cheerful.”

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

“The world is a mist. And then the world is minute and vast and clear.”

“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.”

“Somebody loves us all.”

“—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.”

“Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? Where should we be today?”

“Think of the long trip home.”