Quotes from 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.

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

Life is short. But desire, desire is long.

Time-awareness does indeed watermark my books and my life.

A studio, like a poem, is an intimacy and a freedom you can look out from, into each part of your life and a little beyond.

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.

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

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.

You can't write an image, a metaphor, a story, a phrase, without leaning a little further into the shared world, without recognizing that your supposed solitude is at every point of its perimeter touching some other.

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

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.

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 see poetry as a path toward new understanding and transformation, and so I've looked at specific poems I love, and at poetry's gestures in the broadest sense, in an effort to feel and learn what they offer from the inside.

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.

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.

What we want from art is whatever is missing from the lives we are already living and making. Something is always missing, and so art-making is endless.

Poetry's work is not simply the recording of inner or outer perception; it makes by words and music new possibilities of perceiving

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.

Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own way of working.

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.

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

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

Poetry is a release of something previously unknown into the visible. You write to invite that, to make of yourself a gathering of the unexpected and, with luck, of the unexpectable.

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