Edward Hirsch Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

I put down these memorandums of my affections in honor of tenderness, in honor of all of those who have been conscripted into the brotherhood of loss...

Edward Hirsch
And every year there is a brief, startling moment
When we pause in the middle of a long walk home and
Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless
Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air:
It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies;
It is the changing light of fall falling on us.

Edward Hirsch
Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends.

Edward Hirsch
I did not know the work of mourning
Is a labor in the dark
We carry inside ourselves.

Edward Hirsch
A hook shot kisses the rim and hangs there, helplessly, but doesn't drop and for once our gangly starting center boxes out his man and times his jump perfectly, gathering the orange leather/from the air like a cherished possession.

Edward Hirsch
I am born a poet, of a low class without doubt, yet a poet. This is my nature and vocation.

Edward Hirsch
Look closely and you will see
Almost everyone carrying bags
Of cement on their shoulders
That's why it takes courage
To get out of bed in the morning
And climb into the day.

Edward Hirsch
Works of art imitate and provoke other works of art, the process is the source of art itself.

Edward Hirsch
I felt an angel's possessing grip, the flames
rising from your skin,
the shadow of the divine.

Edward Hirsch
I wish I could believe in the otherworld
I wish I could believe in a place
Of reunions outside of memory.

Edward Hirsch
The poet wants justice. And the poet wants art. In poetry we can't have one without the other.

Edward Hirsch
The spiritual desire for poetry can be overwhelming, so much do I need it to experience and name my own perilous depths and vast spaces, my own well-being.

Edward Hirsch
I am a tiny seashell
that has secretly drifted ashore
and carries the sound of the ocean
surging through its body.

Edward Hirsch
Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.

Edward Hirsch