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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

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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
Attention
Whatever
Delve
Trying
Enter
Going
Pay
Stay
Question
Taught
Least

More quotes by Jane Hirshfield

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Any woodthrush shows it - he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled.
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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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
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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
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Everything has two endings- a horse, a piece of string, a phone call. Before a life, air. And after. As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.
Jane Hirshfield
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There is no paradise, no place of true completion that does not include within its walls the unknown.
Jane Hirshfield
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The trick, though, is to not lose compassion, to not allow the sense of absurdity to outweigh the awareness of real beings, with real feelings. Mean-spirited humor turns the world into cardboard, the way Midas's simple-minded greed turned food into inedible and useless stuff.
Jane Hirshfield
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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
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How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
Jane Hirshfield
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The ability to name poetry's gestures and rhetorics isn't required to write or read them, any more than a painter needs to know the physics of color to bring forward a landscape. The eye and hand and ear know what they need to know. Some of us want to know more, because knowing pleases.
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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How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.
Jane Hirshfield
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as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.
Jane Hirshfield
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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.
Jane Hirshfield
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Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.
Jane Hirshfield
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Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.
Jane Hirshfield
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Passion does not make careful arguments: it declares itself, and that is enough.
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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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
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How fragile we are, between the few good moments.
Jane Hirshfield