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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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Jane Hirshfield
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: February 24
Climate Activist
Essayist
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Truth
Filled
People
Fool
Folktales
Saying
Exempt
Society
Punished
Freedom
Mythology
History
Allowed
Speak
Complete
Stories
Rules

More quotes by Jane Hirshfield

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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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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.
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Passion does not make careful arguments: it declares itself, and that is enough.
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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.
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The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.
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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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How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.
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Life is short. But desire, desire is long.
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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.
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At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink.
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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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Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.
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So few the grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.
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Any woodthrush shows it - he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled.
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Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.
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How fragile we are, between the few good moments.
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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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A person is full of sorrow the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.
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Poems . . . are perfume bottles momentarily unstopped - what they release is volatile and will vanish, and yet it can be released again.
Jane Hirshfield
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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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