Elizabeth Bishop Quotes

'I realize they say we are 'wacko' and 'out there, but we are the most rational of all.

Some of the most valuable stuff I do has to do with my dissenting from the general opinion about people in movements.

Basically, I tend to see the world differently to other people, and I write books and stories to alter the imagination of people so that they also see the world in a different way.

I've always known that I have a different mentality. I can move in different ways and that's for people to realize.

Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.

I think we all see the world from our own little unique bubble.

The world is a very puzzling place. If you're not willing to be puzzled, you just become a replica of someone else's mind.

I'm not the same as other people. I don't think the same. I don't do the same things. I just feel out of this world sometimes.

To live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it.

It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before.

I think in a world where everyone wants to categorize and compartmentalize and rationalize, it's OK to be different.

See what no one else sees. See what everyone chooses not to see... out of fear, conformity or laziness. See the whole world anew each day!

A lot of times nerds are really artists listening to the beat of another drummer.

The stigma of oddness is the price a myopic world always exacts of genius.

I've always felt quite like an outsider. I don't really belong in the mainstream, and I quite like that.

I learned that people like my work because I praise things that others don't like.

Art is something out of the ordinary commenting on the ordinary.

There is a way of looking at an awful place from a certain angle that allows it to take on a beauty because it is what it is.

I am too not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

Isn't telling about something-using words, English or Japanese-already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon this world already something of an invention?

Looking straight at the world is part of your duty as a writer.

To our senses, the elements are four and have ever been, and will ever be for they are the elements of life, of poetry, and of perception, the four Great Ones, the Four Roots, the First Four of Fire and the Wet, Earth and the wide Air of the World. To find the other many elements, you must go to the laboratory and hunt them down. But the four we have always with us, they are our world. Or rather, they have us with them.

I'd rather let the world down than to allow the world to let me down.

This actual world of what is knowable, in which we are and which is in us, remains both the material and the limit of our consideration.

It is the role of the poet to look at what is happening in the world and to know that quite other things are happening.