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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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Jane Hirshfield
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: February 24
Climate Activist
Essayist
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Looks
Studio
Life
Studios
Like
Beyond
Freedom
Part
Littles
Look
Intimacy
Little
Poem

More quotes by Jane Hirshfield

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I travel as much as I do. It isn't the life I expected. I don't know what dust of pollen will come back with me from these travels.But I must trust that I will not treat frivolously the glimpses I've been given into other places and others' lives.
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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Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.
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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You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.
Jane Hirshfield
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How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.
Jane Hirshfield
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At some point I realized that you don't get a full human life if you try to cut off one end of it, that you need to agree to the entire experience, to the full spectrum of what happens.
Jane Hirshfield
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Zen is less the study of doctrine than a set of tools for discovering what can be known when the world is looked at with open eyes.
Jane Hirshfield
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I want to understand the piers of language and music and comprehension that can hold up a building even when what the building houses is an earthquake. This thinking must surely come into the poems I write, but more by osmosis than will.
Jane Hirshfield
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The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.
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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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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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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In my poems though, as you say, the comic arrived fairly late. This doubtless has something to do with growing older. A person who's seen a bit of the world can't help but notice how foolish is the self-centeredness we bring to our tiny slice of existence.
Jane Hirshfield
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Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.
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
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Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags, being careful between the trees to leave extra room.
Jane Hirshfield
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Passion does not make careful arguments: it declares itself, and that is enough.
Jane Hirshfield
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Life is short. But desire, desire is long.
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