Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jane Hirshfield
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: February 24
Climate Activist
Essayist
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Mind
Leap
People
Turned
Listening
Silence
Music
Need
Outward
Feels
Distracted
Needs
Poems

More quotes by Jane Hirshfield

Image
Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
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
Image
The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags, being careful between the trees to leave extra room.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
One breath taken completely one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
A person is full of sorrow the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
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
Image
Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
What lives in words is what words were needed to learn.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
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
Image
Poems . . . are perfume bottles momentarily unstopped - what they release is volatile and will vanish, and yet it can be released again.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
How fragile we are, between the few good moments.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
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
Image
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