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Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.

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
Solitude
Wrong
Soul
Right
Oils
Vinegar
Oil

More quotes by Jane Hirshfield

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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
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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.
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Passion does not make careful arguments: it declares itself, and that is enough.
Jane Hirshfield
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As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.
Jane Hirshfield
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The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.
Jane Hirshfield
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Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am.
Jane Hirshfield
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A person is full of sorrow the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.
Jane Hirshfield
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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.
Jane Hirshfield
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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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Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags, being careful between the trees to leave extra room.
Jane Hirshfield
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In my poems though, as you say, the comic arrived fairly late. This doubtless has something to do with growing older. A person who's seen a bit of the world can't help but notice how foolish is the self-centeredness we bring to our tiny slice of existence.
Jane Hirshfield
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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
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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.
Jane Hirshfield
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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.
Jane Hirshfield
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The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness.
Jane Hirshfield
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How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.
Jane Hirshfield
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A poem can use anything to talk about anything.
Jane Hirshfield
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Life is short. But desire, desire is long.
Jane Hirshfield
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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.
Jane Hirshfield
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Art keeps its newness because it's at once unforgettable and impossible to remember entirely. Art is too volatile, multiple and evaporative to hold on to. It's more chemical reaction, one you have to re-create each time, than a substance. Art's discoveries are also, almost always, counter to ordinary truths.
Jane Hirshfield