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Elizabeth Bishop
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“Someone loves us all.”
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“... are you aware an iceberg takes repose / with you, and when it wakes may pasture on your snows?”
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“This iceberg cuts its facets from within. / Like jewelry from a grave / it saves itself perpetually and adorns / only itself ...”
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“The short, half-tone scale of winter weathers / is a spread pigeon's wing. / Winter lives under a pigeon's wing, a dead wing with damp feathers.”
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“Think of the storm roaming the sky uneasily / like a dog looking for a place to sleep in, / listen to it growling.”
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“Democracy in the contemporary world demands, among other things, an educated and informed people.”
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“What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life / in our bodies, we are determined to rush / to see the sun the other way around?”
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“Oh, must we dream our dreams / and have them, too?”
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“Is it lack of imagination that makes us come / to imagined places, not just stay at home?”
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“... a bird arranges / two notes at right angles.”
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“Her face is closed as a nut, / closed as a careful snail / or a thousand-year-old seed.”
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“The art of losing isn't hard to master ...”
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“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.”
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“[On Marianne Moore:] If she speaks of a chair you can practically sit on it.”
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“So many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.”
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“When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.”
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“Sometimes it seems ... as though only intelligent people are stupid enough to fall in love & only stupid people are intelligent enough to let themselves be loved.”
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“Once more I am overcome by my own amazing sloth and unmannerliness. 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?”
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“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.”
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“... 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 ...”
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“Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs — no regular hours, so many temptations!”
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“As to experience — well, think how little some good poets have had, or how much some bad ones have.”
Elizabeth Bishop, U.S.-born Brazilian poet
(1911 - 1979)