Jane Hirshfield Quotes

Quotes about:

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

  Jane Hirshfield

  Three, Attention, Pay

  46 Copy quote

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

  Jane Hirshfield

  Stories, May, Begin Again

  Jane Hirshfield (1997). “The lives of the heart”, Perennial

  56 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

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

  Jane Hirshfield

  Who I Am, Tree, Looks

  Jane Hirshfield (1997). “The lives of the heart”, Perennial

  18 Copy quote

• How fragile we are, between the few good moments.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Moments, Fragile, Good Moments

  Jane Hirshfield (2011). “Come, Thief: Poems”, p.6, Knopf

  45 Copy quote

• Poems give us permission to be unsure, in ways we must be if we are ever to learn anything not already known. If you look with open eyes at your actual life, it's always going to be the kind of long division problem that doesn't work out perfectly evenly. Poems let you accept the multiplicity and complexity of the actual, they let us navigate the unnavigable, insoluble parts of our individual fates and shared existence.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Eye, Fate, Long

  Source: www.americanmicroreviews.com

  17 Copy quote

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

  Jane Hirshfield

  Laziness, Habit, Familiar

  21 Copy quote

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

  Jane Hirshfield

  Writing, Past, Mind

  8 Copy quote

• How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Heart, Hinges

  Jane Hirshfield (1997). “The lives of the heart”, Perennial

  20 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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, House, Tree

  Jane Hirshfield, “Tree”

  4 Copy quote

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

  Jane Hirshfield

  Ends

  Jane Hirshfield (2010). “After: Poems”, p.7, Harper Collins

  4 Copy quote

• "And" seems to me closest. "And" nods toward the real. And "and" is the path to perspective. To feel and see from more angles and know all of them true, even the incomprehensible ones, even the ones that contradict one another.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Real, Perspective, Path

  "Of Amplitude There Is No Scraping Bottom: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield". Interview with Rebecca Olson, tinhouse.com.

  4 Copy quote

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

  Jane Hirshfield

  Fearless, Sorrow

  16 Copy quote

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

  Jane Hirshfield

  Garden, Essentials, Tasks

  Jane Hirshfield (2011). “Of Gravity & Angels”, p.36, Wesleyan University Press

  4 Copy quote

• Art-making is learned by immersion. You take in vocabularies of thought and feeling, grammar, diction, gesture, from the poems of others, and emerge with the power to turn language into a lathe for re-shaping, re-knowing your own tongue, heart, and life.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Art, Vocabulary, Knowing

  "Of Amplitude There Is No Scraping Bottom: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield". Interview with Rebecca Olson, tinhouse.com. March 16, 2015.

  25 Copy quote

• Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Oil, Soul, Solitude

  Jane Hirshfield, “Vinegar And Oil”

  7 Copy quote

• In order to gain anything, you must first lose everything

  Jane Hirshfield

  Order, Gains, Firsts

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  28 Copy quote

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

  Jane Hirshfield

  Existence, Amazement, Ifs

  "Poet Jane Hirshfield On How To Read Poetry And Restore ‘Amazement’". Interview with Claire Fallon, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 20, 2015.

  19 Copy quote

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

  Jane Hirshfield

  Opening, Knows, Our Lives

  "Fooling with Words". Performance readings at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, billmoyers.com. May 28, 1999.

  7 Copy quote

• The secret of understanding poetry is to hear poetry's words as what they are: the full self's most intimate speech, half waking, half dream. You listen to a poem as you might listen to someone you love who tells you their truest day. Their words might weep, joke, whirl, leap. What's unspoken in the words will still be heard. It's also the way we listen to music: You don't look for extractable meaning, but to be moved.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Dream, Self, Understanding

  Source: www.sfgate.com

  7 Copy quote

• Creativity itself is a joyous unlatching. The act of creative imagining, inventing, saying differently, crafting a metaphor or image, then crafting another metaphor or image when you go further or when you revise - all these take whatever you think "is" and make clear that other possibilities exist as well. The sense of possibility, the amplitude and freedom that sense of malleability brings - for me, that cannot help but be joyous.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Creativity, Thinking, Creative

  Source: www.americanmicroreviews.com

  10 Copy quote

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

  Jane Hirshfield

  Ink, Life Is, Moments

  Interview with Anisse Gross, www.sfgate.com. March 11, 2015.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

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