110+ Jane Hirshfield Quotes On Friendship, World And Being

Jane Hirshfield is an American poet and essayist. She is known for her lyrical and spiritual poetry, which often draws on nature and Eastern philosophy. Her work has been widely anthologized and has earned numerous awards, including the Poetry Center Book Award and the California Book Award. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Jane Hirshfield on friendship, love, world.

Top 10 Jane Hirshfield Quotes

1. You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.
2. The heat of autumn is different from the heat of summer. One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider.
3. Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.
4. How fragile we are, between the few good moments.
5. How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.
6. 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.
7. Poetry's work is not simply the recording of inner or outer perception; it makes by words and music new possibilities of perceiving
8. The creative is always an act of recombination, with something added by new juxtaposition—as making a spark requires two things struck together.
9. 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
10. 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 Short Quotes

• How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
• Metaphors get under your skin by ghosting right past the logical mind.
• Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.
• If truth is the lure, humans are fishes.
• I don't have a cell phone (though for years I've kept saying, "soon").
• Time-awareness does indeed watermark my books and my life.
• Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am.
• Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.
• Between certainty and the real, an ancient enmity.
• In order to gain anything, you must first lose everything

Jane Hirshfield Quotes About Love

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

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

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

Jane Hirshfield Quotes About World

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

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. — 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

In my poems though, as you say, the comic arrived fairly late. This doubtless has something to do with growing older. A person who's seen a bit of the world can't help but notice how foolish is the self-centeredness we bring to our tiny slice of existence. — Jane Hirshfield

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

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

It's more for me as with going into a forest: if you sit quietly for a long time, the life around you emerges. As the world grows ever more clamorous, my hunger for silence steepens. I unplug the landline. — Jane Hirshfield

Go back to The October Palace, which came out in 1994, and there are poems with windows, doors, the rooms of the gorgeous and vanishing palace that is this ordinary world and ordinary life. Jungian archetype would say the house is a figure for the experienced, experiencing self. — Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield Quotes About Heart

Art-making is learned by immersion. You take in vocabularies of thought and feeling, grammar, diction, gesture, from the poems of others, and emerge with the power to turn language into a lathe for re-shaping, re-knowing your own tongue, heart, and life. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

Good poems ask us to have complex minds and hearts. Even simple-of-surface poems want that. Perhaps those are the ones that want it most of all, since that's where they do their work: in the unspoken complexities, understood off the page. — Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield Quotes About Happen

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

The first poem in The Beauty holds a woman in Portugal in a wheelchair singing, with great power, a fado. I have never seen this or heard of it, the image simply arrived. But surely such a thing has happened. And it matters to me that it has, or could. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

A poem's essential discovery can happen at a single sitting. The cascade of discoveries in an essay, or even finding a question worth exploring in one, seems to need roughly the time it takes to plant and harvest a crop of bush beans. — Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield Quotes About Read

Here are poems from a new generation of writers who honor the magnetic fields of the real; who feel and think with full and open-eyed passion; who focus heat as the magnifying glass focuses sun: until the paper catches. Read them. — Jane Hirshfield

The ability to name poetry's gestures and rhetorics isn't required to write or read them, any more than a painter needs to know the physics of color to bring forward a landscape. The eye and hand and ear know what they need to know. Some of us want to know more, because knowing pleases. — Jane Hirshfield

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

Jane Hirshfield Quotes About Poem

I want to preserve a certain unknowing about my own poems - perhaps because unknowing is in itself a useful poetic thirst. To move the perimeter of saying outside my own boundaries is one reason I write. — Jane Hirshfield

I want to understand the piers of language and music and comprehension that can hold up a building even when what the building houses is an earthquake. This thinking must surely come into the poems I write, but more by osmosis than will. — Jane Hirshfield

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

The heft of a life in the hands grows both lighter and weightier. Over time, my life has become more saturated with its shape and made-ness, while my poems have become more and more free. The first word of every poem might be "Yes." The next words: "And then." — Jane Hirshfield

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

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. — Jane Hirshfield

At another level, though, poems can craft an eraser - we can't revise the past, but poems allow us some malleability, an increased freedom of response, comprehension, feeling. Choice, what choices are possible for any given person, is another theme that's run through my work from the start. — Jane Hirshfield

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

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. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

Art keeps its newness because it's at once unforgettable and impossible to remember entirely. Art is too volatile, multiple and evaporative to hold on to. It's more chemical reaction, one you have to re-create each time, than a substance. Art's discoveries are also, almost always, counter to ordinary truths. — Jane Hirshfield

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

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. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

One recurring dream, many others have also: you go into a familiar house, discover a door or hallway, and find the house continues into hidden rooms. Sometimes a whole second house is there, a larger and unknown extension of the familiar dwelling. — Jane Hirshfield

Each poet probably has his or her own cupboard of magnets. For some, it is cars; for others, works of art, or certain patterns of form or sound; for others, certain stories or places, Philip Levine's Detroit, Gwendolyn Brooks's Chicago, Seamus Heaney's time-tunneled, familied Ireland. — Jane Hirshfield

Creativity itself is a joyous unlatching. The act of creative imagining, inventing, saying differently, crafting a metaphor or image, then crafting another metaphor or image when you go further or when you revise - all these take whatever you think "is" and make clear that other possibilities exist as well. The sense of possibility, the amplitude and freedom that sense of malleability brings - for me, that cannot help but be joyous. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

I once was asked to contribute to a mushroom poem anthology. I didn't have anything, and so instead ended up writing the introduction. I think that request made me more alert to mushrooms, and now they've cropped up in my work, the way mushrooms themselves do after rain, quite a lot. But I've only just now taken up mushroom hunting, after going to a class offered at my local library. — Jane Hirshfield

Sam Hamill is a writer unabashedly taking his place within the community of literature and the community of all sentient beings-his fidelity is to the magnificent truth of existence, and to its commensurate singing. — Jane Hirshfield

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

The same words come from each mouth differently. — Jane Hirshfield

A poem can use anything to talk about anything. — Jane Hirshfield

Every other year or so I go to one of those great generous places, the artist retreats. Some of the poems in The Beauty were written at the MacDowell Colony, in New Hampshire, and others at Civitella Ranieri, in Umbria. — Jane Hirshfield

I've gone to Yaddo many times, I've worked at the Rockefeller Foundation's Center for Scholars and Artists in Bellagio. That these are places of beauty and of changed landscape is helpful - but far more important for me is that they offer what I feel as a monastic luxury: undisturbed time. — Jane Hirshfield

Justice lacking passion fails, betrays. — Jane Hirshfield

Poems give us permission to be unsure, in ways we must be if we are ever to learn anything not already known. If you look with open eyes at your actual life, it's always going to be the kind of long division problem that doesn't work out perfectly evenly. Poems let you accept the multiplicity and complexity of the actual, they let us navigate the unnavigable, insoluble parts of our individual fates and shared existence. — 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

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

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

I think, though, that perspective-awareness may follow from a kind of speaking that also came into my work more recently - the "assay" poems (some labeled that, some not) that engage an abstraction or object from multiple angles. — Jane Hirshfield

The untranslatable thought must be the most precise. — Jane Hirshfield

I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With every new poem, an emotion new to the heart, to the world, speaks itself into being. — Jane Hirshfield

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

The writing of an assay-type poem or a poem investigating perspective isn't an exercise of rational or strategic mind. Poems for me are acts of small or large desperation. They grapple with surfaces too steep to walk in any other way, yet which have to be traveled. — Jane Hirshfield

What lives in words is what words were needed to learn. — Jane Hirshfield

In the dictionary of Cat, mercy is missing. — Jane Hirshfield

The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness. — 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 nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us. — 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

"And" seems to me closest. "And" nods toward the real. And "and" is the path to perspective. To feel and see from more angles and know all of them true, even the incomprehensible ones, even the ones that contradict one another. — Jane Hirshfield

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

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

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

Hyesims poems: transformative as walking high granite mountains by moonlight, with fragrant herbs underfoot and a thermos of clear tea in the backpack. Their bedrock is thusness, their images beauty is pellucid and new, their view without limit. The shelf of essential Zen poets for American readers grows larger with this immediately indispensable collection. — Jane Hirshfield

At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink. What I've chosen, what's happened unchosen, can't be unmade or redone. Poetry, though, is a door that only continues to open. Even the unchangeable past changes inside a poem. Not the facts, but the feeling, the comprehension. — Jane Hirshfield

Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags, being careful between the trees to leave extra room. — 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 secret of understanding poetry is to hear poetry's words as what they are: the full self's most intimate speech, half waking, half dream. You listen to a poem as you might listen to someone you love who tells you their truest day. Their words might weep, joke, whirl, leap. What's unspoken in the words will still be heard. It's also the way we listen to music: You don't look for extractable meaning, but to be moved. — Jane Hirshfield

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

Isn't the small and common the field we live our life in? The large comes into a life through small-paned windows. A breath is small, but everything depends on it. A person looks at you a single, brief moment longer than is necessary, and everything is changed. The smaller the clue, the larger the meaning, it sometimes feels. — Jane Hirshfield

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

Life is short. But desire, desire is long. — Jane Hirshfield

I travel as much as I do. It isn't the life I expected. I don't know what dust of pollen will come back with me from these travels.But I must trust that I will not treat frivolously the glimpses I've been given into other places and others' lives. — Jane Hirshfield

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

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. — Jane Hirshfield

Poems offer us counter-knowledges. They let us see what is invisible to ordinary looking, and to find in overlooked corners the opulence of our actual lives. Similarly, we usually spend our waking hours trying to be sure of things - of our decisions, our ideas, our choices. We so want to be right. But we walk by right foot and left foot. — Jane Hirshfield

When I write, I don't know what is going to emerge. I begin in a condition of complete unknowing, an utter nakedness of concept or goal. A word appears, another word appears, an image. It is a moving into mystery. — Jane Hirshfield

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

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

In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble. — Jane Hirshfield

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

Any artist, in any field, wants to press deeper, to discover further. Image and sound play are among the strongest colors available to poetry's palette. For a long time, I've wanted to invite in more strangeness, more freedom of imagination. Yet music, seeing, and meaning are also cohering disciplines. They can be stretched, and that is part of poetry's helium pleasure. But not to the point of breaking. — Jane Hirshfield

Life Lessons by Jane Hirshfield

1. Jane Hirshfield's work emphasizes the importance of living in the present moment and being mindful of the beauty of the world around us.
2. Her poetry encourages us to cultivate a sense of wonder and appreciation for the natural world and to recognize our interconnectedness with all living things.
3. Through her work, we can learn to be more mindful of our actions and to strive to live in harmony with nature.