Jane Hirshfield Quotes

I don't work on poems and essays at once. They walk on different legs, speak with different tongues, draw from different parts of the psyche. Their paces are also different.

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

How sad they are, the promises we never return to. They stay in our mouths, roughen the tongue, lead lives of their own.

A certain amount of housekeeping also goes on in my poems. I wash doorknobs, do dishes, mop floors, patch carpets, cook.

Near even a candle, the visible heat. So it is with a person in love.

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

Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.

I'd say that the middle stanza is closer: that's the place where the poem ranges unexpectedly into a different realm.

A person is full of sorrow the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.

The pressed oil of words can blaze up into music, into image, into the heart and mind's knowledge. The lit and shadowed places within us can be warmed.

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.

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

What lives in words is what words were needed to learn.

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

Justice lacking passion fails, betrays.

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.

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

Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.

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

Life is short. But desire, desire is long.

As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.

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

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

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

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.

A poem can use anything to talk about anything.

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.

Between certainty and the real, an ancient enmity.

as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.

Hope is the hardest love we carry.

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

In a room with many windowssome thoughts slide past uncatchable, ghostly.

Perimeter is not meaning, but it changes meaning, /as wit increases distance, and compassion erodes it.

The heart's actionsare neither the sentence nor its reprieve. Salt hay and thistles, above the cold granite. One bird singing back to another because it can't not.

as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking.So it was when love slipped inside us.