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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
Inside
Cezanne
Alertness
Awaken
Nourishment
Tenderness
Awkward
Apples

More quotes by Jane Hirshfield

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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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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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as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.
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Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.
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How fragile we are, between the few good moments.
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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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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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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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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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Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.
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In the dream life you don't deliberately set out to dream about a house night after night the dream itself insists you look at whatever is trying to come into visibility.
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Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.
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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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The creative is always an act of recombination, with something added by new juxtaposition—as making a spark requires two things struck together.
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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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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.
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A poem can use anything to talk about anything.
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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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Passion does not make careful arguments: it declares itself, and that is enough.
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The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness.
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