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

More quotes by Jane Hirshfield

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How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
Jane Hirshfield
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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.
Jane Hirshfield
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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.
Jane Hirshfield
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Art-making is learned by immersion. You take in vocabularies of thought and feeling, grammar, diction, gesture, from the poems of others, and emerge with the power to turn language into a lathe for re-shaping, re-knowing your own tongue, heart, and life.
Jane Hirshfield
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As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.
Jane Hirshfield
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Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.
Jane Hirshfield
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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.
Jane Hirshfield
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Life is short. But desire, desire is long.
Jane Hirshfield
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How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.
Jane Hirshfield
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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
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At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink.
Jane Hirshfield
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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.
Jane Hirshfield
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Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.
Jane Hirshfield
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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.
Jane Hirshfield
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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
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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.
Jane Hirshfield
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Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes everything is connected pay attention.
Jane Hirshfield
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The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness.
Jane Hirshfield
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Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.
Jane Hirshfield
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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.
Jane Hirshfield