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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
Scales
Balance
Joy
Dark
Happiness
Stills
Grains
Still
Measured
Grain
More quotes by Jane Hirshfield
Any woodthrush shows it - he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled.
Jane Hirshfield
Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.
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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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At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink.
Jane Hirshfield
as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.
Jane Hirshfield
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.
Jane Hirshfield
I need more and more silence, it feels. Poems don't leap into my mind when I'm distracted, turned outward, with other people, listening to music.
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
There is no paradise, no place of true completion that does not include within its walls the unknown.
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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.
Jane Hirshfield
A poem can use anything to talk about anything.
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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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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
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.
Jane Hirshfield
Metaphors think with the imagination and the senses. The hot chili peppers in them explode in the mouth and the mind.
Jane Hirshfield
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.
Jane Hirshfield
How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
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
You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.
Jane Hirshfield