Quote

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.

Jane Hirshfield

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jane Hirshfield
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: February 24
Climate Activist
Essayist
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Needs
Full
Trying
Point
Life
Experience
Happens
Spectrum
Ends
Realized
Human
Entire
Humans
Agree
Need
Cutting

More quotes by Jane Hirshfield

Image
One breath taken completely one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes everything is connected pay attention.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
Poems . . . are perfume bottles momentarily unstopped - what they release is volatile and will vanish, and yet it can be released again.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
A person is full of sorrow the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
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
Image
Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
This garden is no metaphor - more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
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.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
How fragile we are, between the few good moments.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
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.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
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.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags, being careful between the trees to leave extra room.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
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
Image
What lives in words is what words were needed to learn.
Jane Hirshfield