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How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.

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
Heart
Pivots
Hinge
Hinges
Silently

More quotes by Jane Hirshfield

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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.
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Isn't the small and common the field we live our life in? The large comes into a life through small-paned windows. A breath is small, but everything depends on it. A person looks at you a single, brief moment longer than is necessary, and everything is changed. The smaller the clue, the larger the meaning, it sometimes feels.
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as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.
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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.
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Passion does not make careful arguments: it declares itself, and that is enough.
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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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So few the grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.
Jane Hirshfield
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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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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.
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Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.
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One breath taken completely one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.
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Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am.
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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.
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As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.
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How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
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The pressed oil of words can blaze up into music, into image, into the heart and mind's knowledge. The lit and shadowed places within us can be warmed.
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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.
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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.
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Everything has two endings- a horse, a piece of string, a phone call. Before a life, air. And after. As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.
Jane Hirshfield
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Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes everything is connected pay attention.
Jane Hirshfield