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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
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Jane Hirshfield
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: February 24
Climate Activist
Essayist
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Become
Gods
Braced
Body
Bear
Colder
Must
Stones
Bronze
Trying
Bears
Heartless
Something
Weight
Cast
Like
Understood
Stone
Full
Casts
Voice
Bodies
More quotes by Jane Hirshfield
A person is full of sorrow the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.
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Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.
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Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.
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Any woodthrush shows it - he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled.
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Passion does not make careful arguments: it declares itself, and that is enough.
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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.
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Neither a person entirely broken nor one entirely whole can speak. In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.
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Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.
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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.
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Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am.
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Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags, being careful between the trees to leave extra room.
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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.
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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.
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As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A poem can use anything to talk about anything.
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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.
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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.
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