Time to plant tears, says the almanac. The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove and the child draws another inscrutable house.
Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.)
I've never written the things I'd like to write that I've admired all my life. Maybe one never does.
It was cold and windy, scarcely the day to take a walk on that long beach Everything was withdrawn as far as possible, indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken, seabirds in ones or twos.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.
But he sleeps on the top of his mast with his eyes closed tight. The gull inquired into his dream, which was, "I must not fall. The spangled sea below wants me to fall. It is hard as diamonds; it wants to destroy us all.
What the Man-Moth fears most he must do.
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook fast in a corner of his mouth. He didn't fight. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I stared and stared and victory filled up the little rented boat from the pool of bilge where oil had spread a rainbow around the rusted engine to the bailer rusted orange, the sun-cracked thwarts the oarlocks on their strings, the gunnels-until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go.
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.
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?
Icebergs behoove the soul (both being self-made from elements least visible) to see themselves: fleshed, fair, erected, indivisible.
And as to experience-well, think how little some good poets have had, or how much some bad ones have.
Insomnia" perhaps she's a daytime sleeper.
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.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
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.
The pigs stuck out their little feet and snored.
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?
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
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