Elizabeth Bishop Quotes

“Most of those who lost their jobs were men, but government was one of the few options for professionally ambitious women, who could fall under suspicion for simply dressing unconventionally, sharing an apartment with another woman, or socializing in bars known as meeting places for lesbians. [regarding the government firings for homosexuality]”
― Megan Marshall, Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast

“But perhaps because Elizabeth was a woman and not, in his view, a direct competitor …”
― Megan Marshall, Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast

“She recognized in Elizabeth because she knew it in herself, an undeniable and lifesaving need for expression in verse.”
― Megan Marshall, Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast

“Elizabeth Bishop wrote love poems, and poems about lovemaking, and one of the best poems ever written in English about the loss of love, but she had made her way through life as an orphan, a solitary. Reticence wasn’t the reason she’d become a poet of the self—of a singular “mind in action,” as she’d once described the effect she hoped to achieve in her poems. She had discovered early on, perhaps too early, that she was “an I . . . an Elizabeth”—and she’d treasured that painful, “unlikely” self-awareness ever since, knowing it was the same thing as her imagination.”
― Megan Marshall, Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast