Elizabeth Bishop Quotes

Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end.

Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.

Who could look on these monuments without reflecting on the vanity of mortals in thus offering up testimonials of their respect for persons of whose very names posterity is ignorant?

This life, which had been the tomb of his virtue and of his honour, is but a walking shadow; a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Life will end in death and unhappiness, but we do it anyway.

There are many things which swallow up men's thoughts while they live, which they will think little of when they are dying. Hundreds are wholly absorbed in political schemes and seem to care for nothing but the advancement of their own party. Myriads are buried in business and money matters and seem to neglect everything else but this world.

Glory comes too late, after one as been reduced to ashes.

O human beauty, what a dream art thou, that we should cast our life and hopes away on thee!

We try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate - and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish.

I'm very comfortable with the nature of life and death, and that we come to an end. What's most difficult to imagine is that those dreams and early yearnings and desires of childhood and adolescence will also disappear. But who knows? Maybe you become part of the eternal whatever.

Often have I wondered with much curiosity as to our coming into this world and what will follow our departure.

Everything on earth is a game. A passing thing. We all end up dead. We all end up the same, don't we?

Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave.

Heaven fashioned us of nothing; and we strive to bring ourselves to nothing.

Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present.

You live you die and death not ends it.

Could the best and kindest of us who depart from the earth have an opportunity of revisiting it, I suppose he or she (assuming that any Vanity Fair feelings subsist in the sphere whither we are bound) would have a pang of mortification at finding how soon our survivors were consoled.

If everything that ever lived is dead, and everything alive is gonna die...where does the sacred part come in?

How often we sin, how much we deceive, and all for what?... All will end in death, all!

To be immortal and then die

If you were not born in this world, there would be no need to die. To be born in this world is to die, to disappear [laughing].

The last to be overcome is death, and the knowledge of life is the knowledge of death.

As you were, I was. As I am, you will be.

Immortality is a ridiculous illusion, an empty word, a butterfly net chasing the wind.