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There is no paradise, no place of true completion that does not include within its walls the unknown.

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
True
Place
Completion
Doe
Include
Walls
Paradise
Unknown
Wall
Within

More quotes by Jane Hirshfield

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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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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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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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Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am.
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Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.
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Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes everything is connected pay attention.
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It's one of the saving graces in a life, to be able to perceive one's own and others' absurdity, to notice our shared human frailties and be able, at least some of the time, to smile rather than grimace. Like most people, I must have started out with a comic worldview in my cupboard.
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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.
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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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Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.
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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.
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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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The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness.
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Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.
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Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.
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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.
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How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
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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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A poem's essential discovery can happen at a single sitting. The cascade of discoveries in an essay, or even finding a question worth exploring in one, seems to need roughly the time it takes to plant and harvest a crop of bush beans.
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At another level, though, poems can craft an eraser - we can't revise the past, but poems allow us some malleability, an increased freedom of response, comprehension, feeling. Choice, what choices are possible for any given person, is another theme that's run through my work from the start.
Jane Hirshfield