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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jane Hirshfield
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: February 24
Climate Activist
Essayist
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
House
Night
Dream
Look
Come
Visibility
Looks
Insists
Trying
Deliberately
Life
Whatever

More quotes by Jane Hirshfield

Image
Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
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.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
Passion does not make careful arguments: it declares itself, and that is enough.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
How fragile we are, between the few good moments.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
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.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags, being careful between the trees to leave extra room.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
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
Image
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
Image
This garden is no metaphor - more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
The heft of a life in the hands grows both lighter and weightier. Over time, my life has become more saturated with its shape and made-ness, while my poems have become more and more free. The first word of every poem might be Yes. The next words: And then.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
Neither a person entirely broken nor one entirely whole can speak. In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
There is no paradise, no place of true completion that does not include within its walls the unknown.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
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.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
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
Image
A person is full of sorrow the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
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