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So few the grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.
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
Balance
Joy
Dark
Happiness
Stills
Grains
Still
Measured
Grain
Scales
More quotes by Jane Hirshfield
One breath taken completely one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.
Jane Hirshfield
You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.
Jane Hirshfield
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.
Jane Hirshfield
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.
Jane Hirshfield
A poem's essential discovery can happen at a single sitting. The cascade of discoveries in an essay, or even finding a question worth exploring in one, seems to need roughly the time it takes to plant and harvest a crop of bush beans.
Jane Hirshfield
The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness.
Jane Hirshfield
Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.
Jane Hirshfield
Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.
Jane Hirshfield
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
Zen taught me how to pay attention, how to delve, how to question and enter, how to stay with -- or at least want to try to stay with -- whatever is going on.
Jane Hirshfield
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
How sad they are, the promises we never return to. They stay in our mouths, roughen the tongue, lead lives of their own.
Jane Hirshfield
The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.
Jane Hirshfield
Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags, being careful between the trees to leave extra room.
Jane Hirshfield
Poems . . . are perfume bottles momentarily unstopped - what they release is volatile and will vanish, and yet it can be released again.
Jane Hirshfield
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
Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.
Jane Hirshfield
Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.
Jane Hirshfield
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.
Jane Hirshfield
Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes everything is connected pay attention.
Jane Hirshfield