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Neither a person entirely broken nor one entirely whole can speak. In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.

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
Speak
Tremble
Persons
Fearless
Person
Pretend
Whole
Entirely
Neither
Sorrow
Broken
Happiness

More quotes by Jane Hirshfield

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At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink.
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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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How fragile we are, between the few good moments.
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Good poems ask us to have complex minds and hearts. Even simple-of-surface poems want that. Perhaps those are the ones that want it most of all, since that's where they do their work: in the unspoken complexities, understood off the page.
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Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.
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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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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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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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The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness.
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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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So few the grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.
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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.
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In my poems though, as you say, the comic arrived fairly late. This doubtless has something to do with growing older. A person who's seen a bit of the world can't help but notice how foolish is the self-centeredness we bring to our tiny slice of existence.
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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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A person is full of sorrow the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.
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Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.
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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 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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There is no paradise, no place of true completion that does not include within its walls the unknown.
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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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