Jane Hirshfield Quotes - Page 2

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

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

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

Let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly Spoken and silent, surprise you inside your ears Sleeping and waking, unfold itself inside your eyes Let its fierceness and tenderness hold you Let its vastness be undisguised in all your days.

Justice lacking passion fails, betrays.

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.

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.

A poem makes clear without making simple. Poetry's language carries what lives outside language. It's as if you were given a 5-gallon bucket with 10 gallons of water in it. Mysterious thirsts are answered. That alchemical bucket carries secrets also, even the ones we keep from ourselves.

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

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.

I thought I would love you forever—and, a little, I may, in the way I still move toward a crate, knees bent, or reach for a man: as one might stretch for the three or four fruit that lie in the sun at the top of the tree; too ripe for any moment but this, they open their skin at first touch, yielding sweetness, sweetness and heat, and in me, each time since, the answering yes.

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

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

It's one of the saving graces in a life, to be able to perceive one's own and others' absurdity, to notice our shared human frailties and be able, at least some of the time, to smile rather than grimace. Like most people, I must have started out with a comic worldview in my cupboard.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

The untranslatable thought must be the most precise.

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

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

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

The trick, though, is to not lose compassion, to not allow the sense of absurdity to outweigh the awareness of real beings, with real feelings. Mean-spirited humor turns the world into cardboard, the way Midas's simple-minded greed turned food into inedible and useless stuff.