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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.
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
Mouths
Lead
Promise
Return
Stay
Lives
Never
Promises
Tongue
More quotes by 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
Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.
Jane Hirshfield
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.
Jane Hirshfield
The creative is always an act of recombination, with something added by new juxtaposition—as making a spark requires two things struck together.
Jane Hirshfield
Passion does not make careful arguments: it declares itself, and that is enough.
Jane Hirshfield
Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes everything is connected pay attention.
Jane Hirshfield
There is no paradise, no place of true completion that does not include within its walls the unknown.
Jane Hirshfield
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
Neither a person entirely broken nor one entirely whole can speak. In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.
Jane Hirshfield
What lives in words is what words were needed to learn.
Jane Hirshfield
Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am.
Jane Hirshfield
You must try, the voice said, to become colder. I understood at once. It's like the bodies of gods: cast in bronze, braced in stone. Only something heartless could bear the full weight.
Jane Hirshfield
The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.
Jane Hirshfield
A poem makes clear without making simple. Poetry's language carries what lives outside language. It's as if you were given a 5-gallon bucket with 10 gallons of water in it. Mysterious thirsts are answered. That alchemical bucket carries secrets also, even the ones we keep from ourselves.
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A poem can use anything to talk about anything.
Jane Hirshfield
You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.
Jane Hirshfield
Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.
Jane Hirshfield
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.
Jane Hirshfield
Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags, being careful between the trees to leave extra room.
Jane Hirshfield
The heft of a life in the hands grows both lighter and weightier. Over time, my life has become more saturated with its shape and made-ness, while my poems have become more and more free. The first word of every poem might be Yes. The next words: And then.
Jane Hirshfield