Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jane Hirshfield
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: February 24
Climate Activist
Essayist
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Pieces
Limit
Silence
Phone
Call
Phones
Two
Hearing
Everything
Piece
Life
Horse
Endings
Air
String
Limits
Strings

More quotes by Jane Hirshfield

Image
How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
Metaphors think with the imagination and the senses. The hot chili peppers in them explode in the mouth and the mind.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
Art keeps its newness because it's at once unforgettable and impossible to remember entirely. Art is too volatile, multiple and evaporative to hold on to. It's more chemical reaction, one you have to re-create each time, than a substance. Art's discoveries are also, almost always, counter to ordinary truths.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
A person is full of sorrow the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
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.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
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.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
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.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
Poems . . . are perfume bottles momentarily unstopped - what they release is volatile and will vanish, and yet it can be released again.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
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
Image
One breath taken completely one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
There is no paradise, no place of true completion that does not include within its walls the unknown.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
This garden is no metaphor - more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
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
Image
How sad they are, the promises we never return to. They stay in our mouths, roughen the tongue, lead lives of their own.
Jane Hirshfield