Jane Hirshfield famous quotes

You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Stories #May #Begin Again

How fragile we are, between the few good moments.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Moments

Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Three #Attention #Pay

How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Heart

When I write, I don't know what is going to emerge. I begin in a condition of complete unknowing, an utter nakedness of concept or goal. A word appears, another word appears, an image. It is a moving into mystery.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Moving #Writing #Goal

One way poetry connects is across time. . . . Some echo of a writer's physical experience comes into us when we read her poem.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Echoes #Way

A studio, like a poem, is an intimacy and a freedom you can look out from, into each part of your life and a little beyond.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Looks #Littles #Intimacy

In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Fearless #Sorrow

Life is short. But desire, desire is long.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Life Is Short #Long #Desire

I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With every new poem, an emotion new to the heart, to the world, speaks itself into being.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Writing #Heart #Ideas

A tree lives on its roots. If you change the root, you change the tree. Culture lives in human beings. If you change the human heart the culture will follow.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Heart #Roots #Tree

One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Taken #Moments #Anything Can Happen

Gestation requires protected space; ripening requires both permeability to the outer — and non-disturbance.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Space #Gestation #Ripening

There is a door. It opens. Then it is closed. But a slip of light stays, like a scrap of unreadable paper left on the floor, or the one red leaf the snow releases in March
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Light #Doors #Snow

History, mythology, and folktales are filled with stories of people punished for saying the truth. Only the Fool, exempt from society's rules, is allowed to speak with complete freedom.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Truth #People #Stories

The untranslatable thought must be the most precise.
-- Jane Hirshfield

Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Oil #Soul #Solitude

Zen is less the study of doctrine than a set of tools for discovering what can be known when the world is looked at with open eyes.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Eye #Doctrine #Tools

Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Reality #Tasks #Increase

As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Horse #Life Is #This Life

You must try, the voice said, to become colder. I understood at once. It's like the bodies of gods: cast in bronze, braced in stone. Only something heartless could bear the full weight.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Voice #Heartless #Trying

Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Magnification #Clarification

as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Sound #Strings

I thought I would love you forever—and, a little, I may, in the way I still move toward a crate, knees bent, or reach for a man: as one might stretch for the three or four fruit that lie in the sun at the top of the tree; too ripe for any moment but this, they open their skin at first touch, yielding sweetness, sweetness and heat, and in me, each time since, the answering yes.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Lying #Love You #Moving

Tree It is foolish to let a young redwood grow next to a house. Even in this one lifetime, you will have to choose. That great calm being, this clutter of soup pots and books-- Already the first branch-tips brush at the window. Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Book #Tree #House

Neither a person entirely broken nor one entirely whole can speak. In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Broken #Fearless #Sorrow

Everything has two endings- a horse, a piece of string, a phone call. Before a life, air. And after. As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Horse #Two #Phones

What lives in words is what words were needed to learn.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Needed

In the dream life you don't deliberately set out to dream about a house night after night; the dream itself insists you look at whatever is trying to come into visibility.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Dream #Night #House

The creative is always an act of recombination, with something added by new juxtaposition—as making a spark requires two things struck together.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Creativity #Two #Creative

Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags, being careful between the trees to leave extra room.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Grief #Self #Tree

Your fate is to be yourself, both punishment and crime.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Being Yourself #Fate #Punishment

Justice lacking passion fails, betrays.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Passion #Justice #Failing

And when two people have loved each other see how it is like a scar between their bodies, stronger, darker, and proud; how the black cord makes of them a single fabric that nothing can tear or mend.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Love #Two #People

Near even a candle, the visible heat. So it is with a person in love.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Love #Heat #Persons

The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Moon #Darkness #Cold

Every morning is new as the last one, uncreased as the not quite imaginable first.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Morning #Lasts #Firsts

Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Grief #Poetry #Joy

A person is full of sorrow the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Sorrow #Stones #Way

Metaphors get under your skin by ghosting right past the logical mind.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Writing #Past #Mind

Zen taught me how to pay attention, how to delve, how to question and enter, how to stay with -- or at least want to try to stay with -- whatever is going on.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Trying #Attention #Want

Metaphors think with the imagination and the senses. The hot chili peppers in them explode in the mouth and the mind.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Thinking #Imagination #Mind

In the dictionary of Cat, mercy is missing.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Cat #Missing #Mercy

Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Cat #Doors #Long

This garden is no metaphor - more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Garden #Tasks #Earth

The heat of autumn is different from the heat of summer. One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Summer #Autumn #Apples

How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Death #Mesh #Fine

At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Ink #Life Is #Moments

Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Existence #Amazement

Poems . . . are perfume bottles momentarily unstopped—what they release is volatile and will vanish, and yet it can be released again,
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Bottles #Release #Perfume

Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Time

So few the grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Dark #Joy #Balance

If truth is the lure, humans are fishes.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Truth #Truth Is #Fishes

The pressed oil of words can blaze up into music, into image, into the heart and mind's knowledge. The lit and shadowed places within us can be warmed.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Heart #Oil #Mind

The same words come from each mouth differently.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Mouths

Words are not the end of thought, they are where it begins.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Ends

Any woodthrush shows it - he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Bird #World #Shows

There is no paradise, no place of true completion that does not include within its walls the unknown.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Wall #Doe #Paradise

Poetry's work is not simply the recording of inner or outer perception; it makes by words and music new possibilities of perceiving
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Perception #Possibility

There are openings in our lives of which we know nothing.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Opening

Habit, laziness, and fear conspire to keep us comfortably within the familiar.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Laziness #Habit #Familiar

The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Apples #Awkward #Cezanne

At some point I realized that you don't get a full human life if you try to cut off one end of it, that you need to agree to the entire experience, to the full spectrum of what happens.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Cutting #Trying #Needs

How sad they are, the promises we never return to. They stay in our mouths, roughen the tongue, lead lives of their own.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Promise #Mouths #Tongue

Some questions cannot be answered. They become familiar weights in the hand, round stones pulled from the pocket, unyielding and cool.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Hands #Pockets #Weight

Between certainty and the real, an ancient enmity.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Real #Enmity #Ancient

Let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly Spoken and silent, surprise you inside your ears Sleeping and waking, unfold itself inside your eyes Let its fierceness and tenderness hold you Let its vastness be undisguised in all your days.
-- Jane Hirshfield

#Sleep #Eye #Ears