Quote

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

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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
Dream
Look
Come
Visibility
Looks
Insists
Trying
Deliberately
Life
Whatever
House
Night

More quotes by Jane Hirshfield

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What lives in words is what words were needed to learn.
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Poems' deep work is a matter of language, but also a matter of life. One part of that work is to draw into our awareness and into language itself the unobvious and the unexpected.
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How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
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Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.
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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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This garden is no metaphor - more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can.
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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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A person is full of sorrow the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.
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Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.
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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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Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am.
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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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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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As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.
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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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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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I need more and more silence, it feels. Poems don't leap into my mind when I'm distracted, turned outward, with other people, listening to music.
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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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Life is short. But desire, desire is long.
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Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.
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