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At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink.

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
Unnoticed
Ink
Began
Written
Moment
Understand
Moments
Life
Indelible

More quotes by Jane Hirshfield

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Passion does not make careful arguments: it declares itself, and that is enough.
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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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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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So few the grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.
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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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Poems offer us counter-knowledges. They let us see what is invisible to ordinary looking, and to find in overlooked corners the opulence of our actual lives. Similarly, we usually spend our waking hours trying to be sure of things - of our decisions, our ideas, our choices. We so want to be right. But we walk by right foot and left foot.
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Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.
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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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Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.
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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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Neither a person entirely broken nor one entirely whole can speak. In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.
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Any woodthrush shows it - he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled.
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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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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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Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes everything is connected pay attention.
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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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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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This garden is no metaphor - more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can.
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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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