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

More quotes by Jane Hirshfield

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How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
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Neither a person entirely broken nor one entirely whole can speak. In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.
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As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.
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Life is short. But desire, desire is long.
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What lives in words is what words were needed to learn.
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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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Metaphors think with the imagination and the senses. The hot chili peppers in them explode in the mouth and the mind.
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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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Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes everything is connected pay attention.
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Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.
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How fragile we are, between the few good moments.
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A poem's essential discovery can happen at a single sitting. The cascade of discoveries in an essay, or even finding a question worth exploring in one, seems to need roughly the time it takes to plant and harvest a crop of bush beans.
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How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.
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The trick, though, is to not lose compassion, to not allow the sense of absurdity to outweigh the awareness of real beings, with real feelings. Mean-spirited humor turns the world into cardboard, the way Midas's simple-minded greed turned food into inedible and useless stuff.
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Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.
Jane Hirshfield
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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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Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.
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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.
Jane Hirshfield
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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.
Jane Hirshfield
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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.
Jane Hirshfield