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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
Freedom
Mythology
History
Allowed
Speak
Complete
Stories
Rules
Truth
Filled
People
Fool
Folktales
Saying
Exempt
Society
Punished

More quotes by Jane Hirshfield

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The trick, though, is to not lose compassion, to not allow the sense of absurdity to outweigh the awareness of real beings, with real feelings. Mean-spirited humor turns the world into cardboard, the way Midas's simple-minded greed turned food into inedible and useless stuff.
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Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.
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So few the grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.
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The writing of an assay-type poem or a poem investigating perspective isn't an exercise of rational or strategic mind. Poems for me are acts of small or large desperation. They grapple with surfaces too steep to walk in any other way, yet which have to be traveled.
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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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Neither a person entirely broken nor one entirely whole can speak. In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.
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How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
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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.
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Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.
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At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink.
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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.
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Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.
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Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.
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Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags, being careful between the trees to leave extra room.
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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.
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This garden is no metaphor - more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can.
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Poems offer us counter-knowledges. They let us see what is invisible to ordinary looking, and to find in overlooked corners the opulence of our actual lives. Similarly, we usually spend our waking hours trying to be sure of things - of our decisions, our ideas, our choices. We so want to be right. But we walk by right foot and left foot.
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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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The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness.
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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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