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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
Hot
Mouth
Senses
Mouths
Chili
Imagination
Peppers
Mind
Explode
Think
Metaphors
Thinking
Metaphor

More quotes by 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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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.
Jane Hirshfield
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Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes everything is connected pay attention.
Jane Hirshfield
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What lives in words is what words were needed to learn.
Jane Hirshfield
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I want to understand the piers of language and music and comprehension that can hold up a building even when what the building houses is an earthquake. This thinking must surely come into the poems I write, but more by osmosis than will.
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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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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How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.
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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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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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
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Life is short. But desire, desire is long.
Jane Hirshfield
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Go back to The October Palace, which came out in 1994, and there are poems with windows, doors, the rooms of the gorgeous and vanishing palace that is this ordinary world and ordinary life. Jungian archetype would say the house is a figure for the experienced, experiencing self.
Jane Hirshfield
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Good poems ask us to have complex minds and hearts. Even simple-of-surface poems want that. Perhaps those are the ones that want it most of all, since that's where they do their work: in the unspoken complexities, understood off the page.
Jane Hirshfield
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At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink.
Jane Hirshfield
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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
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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.
Jane Hirshfield
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One breath taken completely one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.
Jane Hirshfield
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Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.
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.
Jane Hirshfield