Quote

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

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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
Music
Pressed
Heart
Lit
Mind
Oil
Image
Places
Within
Shadowed
Knowledge
Warmed
Words
Blaze

More quotes by 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.
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Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.
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So few the grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.
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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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How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.
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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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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.
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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.
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What lives in words is what words were needed to learn.
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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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One breath taken completely one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.
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The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.
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Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes everything is connected pay attention.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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.
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Metaphors think with the imagination and the senses. The hot chili peppers in them explode in the mouth and the mind.
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