Jane Hirshfield Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Think assailable thoughts, or be lonely. — Jane Hirshfield

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

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

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

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

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

Hunger that comes and goes turns time into memory. — Jane Hirshfield

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Jane Hirshfield

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

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

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

Hope is the hardest love we carry. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In order to gain anything, you must first lose everything — Jane Hirshfield

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

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

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

[A]rt can't ever be programmatic ... it needs on the contrary to be complicating, subtle, questioning, doubtful and doubting. — Tony Leuzzi

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

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

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. — Jane Hirshfield

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A poem can use anything to talk about anything. — Jane Hirshfield

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

Time-awareness does indeed watermark my books and my life. — Jane Hirshfield

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

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

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

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

Desire is the moment before the race is run. — Jane Hirshfield

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

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

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

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

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