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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
Metaphors think with the imagination and the senses. The hot chili peppers in them explode in the mouth and the mind.
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How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.
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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.
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Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.
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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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What lives in words is what words were needed to learn.
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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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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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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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The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.
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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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Good poems ask us to have complex minds and hearts. Even simple-of-surface poems want that. Perhaps those are the ones that want it most of all, since that's where they do their work: in the unspoken complexities, understood off the page.
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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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Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.
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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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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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Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am.
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.
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Neither a person entirely broken nor one entirely whole can speak. In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.
Jane Hirshfield