Jane Hirshfield Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• 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

  Perception, Possibility, Words And Music

  Jane Hirshfield (2015). “Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World”, p.8, Knopf

  12 Copy quote

• Evolution tells us how to survive; art tells us how it's possible still to live even while knowing that we and all we love will someday vanish. It says there's beauty even in grief, freedom even inside the strictures of form and of life. What's liberating isn't what's simplest; it's the ability to include more and more shadows, colors and possibilities inside any moment's meeting of self and world.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Art, Grief, Self

  Source: www.sfgate.com

  4 Copy quote

• Art keeps its newness because it's at once unforgettable and impossible to remember entirely. Art is too volatile, multiple and evaporative to hold on to. It's more chemical reaction, one you have to re-create each time, than a substance. Art's discoveries are also, almost always, counter to ordinary truths.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Art, Discovery, Ordinary

  Source: www.sfgate.com

  13 Copy quote

• One recurring dream, many others have also: you go into a familiar house, discover a door or hallway, and find the house continues into hidden rooms. Sometimes a whole second house is there, a larger and unknown extension of the familiar dwelling.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Dream, Doors, Dwelling

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

  7 Copy quote

• Here are poems from a new generation of writers who honor the magnetic fields of the real; who feel and think with full and open-eyed passion; who focus heat as the magnifying glass focuses sun: until the paper catches. Read them.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Real, Passion, Thinking

  12 Copy quote

• It's more for me as with going into a forest: if you sit quietly for a long time, the life around you emerges. As the world grows ever more clamorous, my hunger for silence steepens. I unplug the landline.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Long, Silence, Forests

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

  4 Copy quote

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

  Jane Hirshfield

  Dark, Joy, Balance

  4 Copy quote

• Justice lacking passion fails, betrays.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Passion, Justice, Failing

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• Between certainty and the real, an ancient enmity.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Real, Enmity, Ancient

  4 Copy quote

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

  Jane Hirshfield

  Hands, Stones, Pockets

  Jane Hirshfield (2011). “Of Gravity & Angels”, p.13, Wesleyan University Press

  4 Copy quote

• Isn't the small and common the field we live our life in? The large comes into a life through small-paned windows. A breath is small, but everything depends on it. A person looks at you a single, brief moment longer than is necessary, and everything is changed. The smaller the clue, the larger the meaning, it sometimes feels.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Looks, Fields, Common

  Source: www.americanmicroreviews.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  People, Silence, Listening

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

  4 Copy quote

• Zen taught me how to pay attention, how to delve, how to question and enter, how to stay with -- or at least want to try to stay with -- whatever is going on.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Trying, Taught, Attention

  4 Copy quote

• 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 profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With every new poem, an emotion new to the heart, to the world, speaks itself into being.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Writing, Heart, Ideas

  5 Copy quote

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

  Jane Hirshfield

  Reality, Tasks, Increase

  4 Copy quote

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

  Jane Hirshfield

  Broken, Fearless, Sorrow

  4 Copy quote

• Life is short.
  But desire, desire is long.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Life Is Short, Long, Desire

  Jane Hirshfield (2011). “Of Gravity & Angels”, p.18, Wesleyan University Press

  4 Copy quote

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

  Jane Hirshfield

  Book, Doe, Awareness

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

  4 Copy quote

• I've gone to Yaddo many times, I've worked at the Rockefeller Foundation's Center for Scholars and Artists in Bellagio. That these are places of beauty and of changed landscape is helpful - but far more important for me is that they offer what I feel as a monastic luxury: undisturbed time.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Artist, Luxury, Important

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

  7 Copy quote

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

  Jane Hirshfield

  Might, Woods, Path

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

  4 Copy quote

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

  Jane Hirshfield

  Time

  4 Copy quote

• Good poems ask us to have complex minds and hearts. Even simple-of-surface poems want that. Perhaps those are the ones that want it most of all, since that's where they do their work: in the unspoken complexities, understood off the page.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Heart, Simple, Mind

  Source: www.americanmicroreviews.com

  4 Copy quote

• Poems' deep work is a matter of language, but also a matter of life. One part of that work is to draw into our awareness and into language itself the unobvious and the unexpected.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Matter, Unexpected, Language

  Source: www.americanmicroreviews.com

  4 Copy quote

• Houses are fundamental metaphors for self, world, permeability, transition, interiority, exteriority, multiplicity, and the power to move from one state of being to another.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Moving, Self, House

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

  10 Copy quote

• So much of our lives depends on accidents of birth, time, and geography. This haunts me. In some lives, few "or"s are possible. The pain of that is behind the second stanza of this poem.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Pain, Birth, Geography

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

  4 Copy quote

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