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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.
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
Thinking
Metaphor
Hot
Mouth
Senses
Mouths
Chili
Imagination
Peppers
Mind
Explode
Think
Metaphors
More quotes by Jane Hirshfield
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
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.
Jane Hirshfield
So few the grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.
Jane Hirshfield
Poems . . . are perfume bottles momentarily unstopped - what they release is volatile and will vanish, and yet it can be released again.
Jane Hirshfield
Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.
Jane Hirshfield
This garden is no metaphor - more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can.
Jane Hirshfield
Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.
Jane Hirshfield
At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink.
Jane Hirshfield
As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.
Jane Hirshfield
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
You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.
Jane Hirshfield
Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes everything is connected pay attention.
Jane Hirshfield
Passion does not make careful arguments: it declares itself, and that is enough.
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
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
Life is short. But desire, desire is long.
Jane Hirshfield
How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
Jane Hirshfield
There is no paradise, no place of true completion that does not include within its walls the unknown.
Jane Hirshfield
Neither a person entirely broken nor one entirely whole can speak. In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.
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