Jane Hirshfield Quotes

42 quotes in 567 categories

• The heat of autumn is different from the heat of summer. One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider.
• This garden is no metaphor - more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can.
• 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…
• One way poetry connects is across time. . . . Some echo of a writer's physical experience comes into us when we read her poem.
• As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.
• Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.
• 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…
• 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…
• In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.
• How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Gestation requires protected space; ripening requires both permeability to the outer — and non-disturbance.
• 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…
• 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…
• If truth is the lure, humans are fishes.
• Any woodthrush shows it - he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled.
• Poetry's work is not simply the recording of inner or outer perception; it makes by words and music new possibilities of perceiving
• 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…

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