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Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.

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
Poems
Existence
Nothing
Good
Amazement
Restore

More quotes by Jane Hirshfield

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Life is short. But desire, desire is long.
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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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as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.
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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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A poem can use anything to talk about anything.
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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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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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Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.
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At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink.
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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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How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.
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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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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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The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness.
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Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.
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What lives in words is what words were needed to learn.
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As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.
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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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You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.
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Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags, being careful between the trees to leave extra room.
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