Quote

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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Jane Hirshfield
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: February 24
Climate Activist
Essayist
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Ever
Emerges
Going
Quietly
Long
Forest
Time
Forests
Life
Hunger
World
Silence
Grows
Clamorous
Around
Unplug

More quotes by Jane Hirshfield

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Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.
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The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness.
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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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A person is full of sorrow the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.
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Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes everything is connected pay attention.
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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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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.
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Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.
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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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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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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.
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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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How fragile we are, between the few good moments.
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Passion does not make careful arguments: it declares itself, and that is enough.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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This garden is no metaphor - more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can.
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