Quotes from 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.

Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.

How fragile we are, between the few good moments.

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

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

Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.

How fragile we are, between the few good moments.

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

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

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.

Tree It is foolish to let a young redwood grow next to a house. Even in this one lifetime, you will have to choose. That great calm being, this clutter of soup pots and books-- Already the first branch-tips brush at the window. Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

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

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.

Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.

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

And that other self, who watches me from the distance of decades, what will she say? Will she look at me with hatred or with compassion, I whose choices made her what she will be?

The Cloudy Vase Past time, I threw the flowers out, washed out the cloudy vase. How easily the old clearness leapt, like a practiced tiger, back inside it.

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

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

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

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.

There the beloved red sweater, bright tangle of necklace, earrings of amber. Each confirming: I chose these, I. But habit is different: it chooses. And we, it's good horse, opening our mouths at even the sight of the bit.

Do not follow the ancient masters, seek what they sought.

The heart's actions are 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.