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Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.
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
Within
Permeable
Sustained
Expansion
Concentration
Grow
Silence
Grows
More quotes by Jane Hirshfield
Passion does not make careful arguments: it declares itself, and that is enough.
Jane Hirshfield
Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.
Jane Hirshfield
Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.
Jane Hirshfield
as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.
Jane Hirshfield
A poem makes clear without making simple. Poetry's language carries what lives outside language. It's as if you were given a 5-gallon bucket with 10 gallons of water in it. Mysterious thirsts are answered. That alchemical bucket carries secrets also, even the ones we keep from ourselves.
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
I travel as much as I do. It isn't the life I expected. I don't know what dust of pollen will come back with me from these travels.But I must trust that I will not treat frivolously the glimpses I've been given into other places and others' lives.
Jane Hirshfield
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
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
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
How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
Jane Hirshfield
The pressed oil of words can blaze up into music, into image, into the heart and mind's knowledge. The lit and shadowed places within us can be warmed.
Jane Hirshfield
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
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.
Jane Hirshfield
A person is full of sorrow the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.
Jane Hirshfield
Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.
Jane Hirshfield
There is no paradise, no place of true completion that does not include within its walls the unknown.
Jane Hirshfield
Life is short. But desire, desire is long.
Jane Hirshfield
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
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