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

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
Love
Untouched
Slipped
Strings
Speaking
Inside
Sound

More quotes by Jane Hirshfield

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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.
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The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.
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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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How fragile we are, between the few good moments.
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Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.
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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.
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So few the grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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This garden is no metaphor - more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can.
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Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.
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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 creative is always an act of recombination, with something added by new juxtaposition—as making a spark requires two things struck together.
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A poem can use anything to talk about anything.
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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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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