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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
Untouched
Slipped
Strings
Speaking
Inside
Sound
Love

More quotes by Jane Hirshfield

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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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The ability to name poetry's gestures and rhetorics isn't required to write or read them, any more than a painter needs to know the physics of color to bring forward a landscape. The eye and hand and ear know what they need to know. Some of us want to know more, because knowing pleases.
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Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.
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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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Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.
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I travel as much as I do. It isn't the life I expected. I don't know what dust of pollen will come back with me from these travels.But I must trust that I will not treat frivolously the glimpses I've been given into other places and others' lives.
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Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am.
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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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Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.
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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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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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How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.
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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.
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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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Passion does not make careful arguments: it declares itself, and that is enough.
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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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It's one of the saving graces in a life, to be able to perceive one's own and others' absurdity, to notice our shared human frailties and be able, at least some of the time, to smile rather than grimace. Like most people, I must have started out with a comic worldview in my cupboard.
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Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.
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So few the grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.
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How fragile we are, between the few good moments.
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