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.

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

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?

What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.

Something needn't be large to be good.

Why shouldn't we, so generally addicted to the gigantic, at last have some small works of art, some short poems, short pieces of music [...], some intimate, low-voiced, and delicate things in our mostly huge and roaring, glaring world?