Jane Hirshfield

The same words come from each mouth differently.

— Jane Hirshfield

A poem can use anything to talk about anything.

— Jane Hirshfield

In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.

— Jane Hirshfield

How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.

— Jane Hirshfield

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

— Jane Hirshfield

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

— 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

A studio, like a poem, is an intimacy and a freedom you can look out from, into each part of your life…

— Jane Hirshfield

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

— Jane Hirshfield

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

— Jane Hirshfield

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

— Jane Hirshfield

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

— Jane Hirshfield

It's one of the saving graces in a life, to be able to perceive one's own and others' absurdity, to notice our…

— Jane Hirshfield

There is a door. It opens. Then it is closed. But a slip of light stays, like a scrap of unreadable paper…

— Jane Hirshfield

I travel as much as I do. It isn't the life I expected. I don't know what dust of pollen will come…

— Jane Hirshfield

Art keeps its newness because it's at once unforgettable and impossible to remember entirely. Art is too volatile, multiple and evaporative to…

— Jane Hirshfield

Good poems ask us to have complex minds and hearts. Even simple-of-surface poems want that. Perhaps those are the ones that want…

— Jane Hirshfield

“There the beloved red sweater, bright tangle of necklace, earrings of amber. Each confirming: I chose these, I. But habit is different:…

— Jane Hirshfield

I see poetry as a path toward new understanding and transformation, and so I've looked at specific poems I love, and at…

— Jane Hirshfield

A poem makes clear without making simple. Poetry's language carries what lives outside language. It's as if you were given a 5-gallon…

— Jane Hirshfield

I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger…

— Jane Hirshfield

Poems offer us counter-knowledges. They let us see what is invisible to ordinary looking, and to find in overlooked corners the opulence…

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

— Jane Hirshfield

Everything has two endings- a horse, a piece of string, a phone call. Before a life, air. And after. As silence is…

— 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

My job as a human being as well as a writer is to feel as thoroughly as possible the experience that I…

— 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

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

— Jane Hirshfield

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

— Jane Hirshfield

The pressed oil of words can blaze up into music, into image, into the heart and mind's knowledge. The lit and shadowed…

— 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

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

— Jane Hirshfield

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

— Jane Hirshfield

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

— Jane Hirshfield

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

— Jane Hirshfield

Zen is less the study of doctrine than a set of tools for discovering what can be known when the world is…

— 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…

— Jane Hirshfield

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

— Jane Hirshfield