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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
Grow
Silence
Grows
Within
Permeable
Sustained
Expansion
Concentration
More quotes by Jane Hirshfield
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
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.
Jane Hirshfield
Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.
Jane Hirshfield
Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.
Jane Hirshfield
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
It's one of the saving graces in a life, to be able to perceive one's own and others' absurdity, to notice our shared human frailties and be able, at least some of the time, to smile rather than grimace. Like most people, I must have started out with a comic worldview in my cupboard.
Jane Hirshfield
As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.
Jane Hirshfield
How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
Jane Hirshfield
Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes everything is connected pay attention.
Jane Hirshfield
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
You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.
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
How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.
Jane Hirshfield
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
as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.
Jane Hirshfield
The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.
Jane Hirshfield
Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.
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
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
Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am.
Jane Hirshfield