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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
Must
Stones
Bronze
Trying
Bears
Heartless
Something
Weight
Cast
Like
Understood
Stone
Full
Casts
Voice
Bodies
Become
Gods
Braced
Body
Bear
Colder

More quotes by Jane Hirshfield

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Any woodthrush shows it - he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled.
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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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Poems . . . are perfume bottles momentarily unstopped - what they release is volatile and will vanish, and yet it can be released again.
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At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink.
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How sad they are, the promises we never return to. They stay in our mouths, roughen the tongue, lead lives of their own.
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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
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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.
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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.
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One breath taken completely one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.
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Life is short. But desire, desire is long.
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How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
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You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.
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There is no paradise, no place of true completion that does not include within its walls the unknown.
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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.
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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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As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.
Jane Hirshfield
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as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.
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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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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.
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Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.
Jane Hirshfield