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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
Sound
Love
Untouched
Slipped
Strings
Speaking
Inside

More quotes by Jane Hirshfield

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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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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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How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
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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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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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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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Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.
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Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.
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Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am.
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I want to understand the piers of language and music and comprehension that can hold up a building even when what the building houses is an earthquake. This thinking must surely come into the poems I write, but more by osmosis than will.
Jane Hirshfield
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So few the grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.
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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.
Jane Hirshfield
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Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.
Jane Hirshfield