Jane Hirshfield Quotes

23 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

Jane Hirshfield
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.

Jane Hirshfield
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.

Jane Hirshfield
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.

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

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

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

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

Jane Hirshfield
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.

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

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

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

Jane Hirshfield
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.

Jane Hirshfield
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.

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

Jane Hirshfield
The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.

Jane Hirshfield
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

Jane Hirshfield
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