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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
Broken
Happiness
Speak
Tremble
Persons
Fearless
Person
Pretend
Whole
Entirely
Neither
Sorrow
More quotes by Jane Hirshfield
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.
Jane Hirshfield
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
You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.
Jane Hirshfield
The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness.
Jane Hirshfield
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
The writing of an assay-type poem or a poem investigating perspective isn't an exercise of rational or strategic mind. Poems for me are acts of small or large desperation. They grapple with surfaces too steep to walk in any other way, yet which have to be traveled.
Jane Hirshfield
A person is full of sorrow the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.
Jane Hirshfield
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.
Jane Hirshfield
Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.
Jane Hirshfield
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.
Jane Hirshfield
Metaphors think with the imagination and the senses. The hot chili peppers in them explode in the mouth and the mind.
Jane Hirshfield
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.
Jane Hirshfield
At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink.
Jane Hirshfield
This garden is no metaphor - more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can.
Jane Hirshfield
Isn't the small and common the field we live our life in? The large comes into a life through small-paned windows. A breath is small, but everything depends on it. A person looks at you a single, brief moment longer than is necessary, and everything is changed. The smaller the clue, the larger the meaning, it sometimes feels.
Jane Hirshfield
The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.
Jane Hirshfield
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.
Jane Hirshfield
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
What lives in words is what words were needed to learn.
Jane Hirshfield
How fragile we are, between the few good moments.
Jane Hirshfield
