Jane Hirshfield quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Jane Hirshfield on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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

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

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

A certain amount of housekeeping also goes on in my poems. I wash doorknobs, do dishes, mop floors, patch carpets, cook.

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

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

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

I will never become a horse trainer, a biologist, a person competent with a hammer. My loves were my loves.

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

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

Art can be defined as beauty able to transcend the circumstances of its making.

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

There are worlds / in which nothing is adjective, everything noun.

I need more and more silence, it feels. Poems don't leap into my mind when I'm distracted, turned outward, with other people, listening to music.

Do not follow the ancient masters, seek what they sought.

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

The heat of autumn is different from the heat of summer. One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider.
[Autumn]

Passion does not make careful arguments: it declares itself, and that is enough.

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

The same words come from each mouth differently.

In order to gain anything, you must first lose everything

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

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

In the dictionary of Cat, mercy is missing.

over 19,000 haiku about Spam - "Spamku" - have to this date been posted online.

I don't have a cell phone (though for years I've kept saying, "soon").

Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.

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

I feel like I am in the service of the poem. The poem isn't something I make. The poem is something I serve.

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

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

If truth is the lure, humans are fishes.

Desire is the moment before the race is run.

How fragile we are, between the few good moments.

Clear moon, a boy afraid of foxes walked home by his lover

How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.

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

Time-awareness does indeed watermark my books and my life.

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

A poem can use anything to talk about anything.

As some strings, untouched,
sound when no one is speaking.
So it was when love slipped inside us.

In a room with many windows
some thoughts slide past uncatchable, ghostly.

Perimeter is not meaning, but it changes meaning,/as wit increases distance, and compassion erodes it.

Think assailable thoughts, or be lonely.

Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.

Something looks back from the trees,
and knows me for who I am.

What lives in words is what words were needed to learn.

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

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

My job as a human being as well as a writer is to feel as thoroughly as possible the experience that I am part of, and then press it a little further.

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

Hope is the hardest love we carry.

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

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

Why ask art into a life at all, if not to be transformed and enlarged by its presence and mysterious means? Some

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

An ordinary hole beside a path through the woods might begin to open to altered worlds.

Hunger that comes and goes turns time into memory.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

I'd say that the middle stanza is closer: that's the place where the poem ranges unexpectedly into a different realm.

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

The untranslatable thought must be the most precise.

if you see for yourself, hear for yourself, and enter deeply enough this seeing and hearing, all things will speak with and through you.

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

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

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

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

Life is short.
But desire, desire is long.

Let reason flow like water around a stone, the stone remains.

Between certainty and the real, an ancient enmity.

Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own way of working.