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The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.

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
Cezanne
Alertness
Awaken
Nourishment
Tenderness
Awkward
Apples
Inside

More quotes by Jane Hirshfield

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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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How fragile we are, between the few good moments.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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Neither a person entirely broken nor one entirely whole can speak. In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.
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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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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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A poem can use anything to talk about anything.
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Any woodthrush shows it - he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled.
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I travel as much as I do. It isn't the life I expected. I don't know what dust of pollen will come back with me from these travels.But I must trust that I will not treat frivolously the glimpses I've been given into other places and others' lives.
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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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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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Poems . . . are perfume bottles momentarily unstopped - what they release is volatile and will vanish, and yet it can be released again.
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Zen is less the study of doctrine than a set of tools for discovering what can be known when the world is looked at with open eyes.
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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.
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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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