Jane Hirshfield Quotes

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

The heat of autumn is different from the heat of summer. One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider.

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

How fragile we are, between the few good moments.

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

How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.

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

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

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

You must try, the voice said, to become colder. I understood at once. It's like the bodies of gods: cast in bronze, braced in stone. Only something heartless could bear the full weight.

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

Poetry's work is not simply the recording of inner or outer perception; it makes by words and music new possibilities of perceiving

The creative is always an act of recombination, with something added by new juxtaposition—as making a spark requires two things struck together.

Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy.

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 floor, or the one red leaf the snow releases in March

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

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

In the dictionary of Cat, mercy is missing.

One way poetry connects is across time. . . . Some echo of a writer's physical experience comes into us when we read her poem.

And when two people have loved each other see how it is like a scar between their bodies, stronger, darker, and proud; how the black cord makes of them a single fabric that nothing can tear or mend.

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

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

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.

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

Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.

The untranslatable thought must be the most precise.

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

If truth is the lure, humans are fishes.

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

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.

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.

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

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 is trying to come into visibility.

In order to gain anything, you must first lose everything

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

The same words come from each mouth differently.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Everything has two endings- a horse, a piece of string, a phone call. Before a life, air. And after. As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.