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Life is short. But desire, desire is long.
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
Long
Life
Short
Desire
More quotes by Jane Hirshfield
A poem can use anything to talk about anything.
Jane Hirshfield
Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.
Jane Hirshfield
So few the grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.
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The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness.
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How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.
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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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There is no paradise, no place of true completion that does not include within its walls the unknown.
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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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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
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.
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The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.
Jane Hirshfield
What lives in words is what words were needed to learn.
Jane Hirshfield
Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.
Jane Hirshfield
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
The ability to name poetry's gestures and rhetorics isn't required to write or read them, any more than a painter needs to know the physics of color to bring forward a landscape. The eye and hand and ear know what they need to know. Some of us want to know more, because knowing pleases.
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Art keeps its newness because it's at once unforgettable and impossible to remember entirely. Art is too volatile, multiple and evaporative to hold on to. It's more chemical reaction, one you have to re-create each time, than a substance. Art's discoveries are also, almost always, counter to ordinary truths.
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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
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
Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags, being careful between the trees to leave extra room.
Jane Hirshfield
How fragile we are, between the few good moments.
Jane Hirshfield