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Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am.

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
Looks
Something
Trees
Tree
Back

More quotes by Jane Hirshfield

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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.
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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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
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A person is full of sorrow the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.
Jane Hirshfield
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Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.
Jane Hirshfield
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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
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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
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How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
Jane Hirshfield
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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.
Jane Hirshfield
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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
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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
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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
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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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The creative is always an act of recombination, with something added by new juxtaposition—as making a spark requires two things struck together.
Jane Hirshfield
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Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.
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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The trick, though, is to not lose compassion, to not allow the sense of absurdity to outweigh the awareness of real beings, with real feelings. Mean-spirited humor turns the world into cardboard, the way Midas's simple-minded greed turned food into inedible and useless stuff.
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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Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.
Jane Hirshfield
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There is no paradise, no place of true completion that does not include within its walls the unknown.
Jane Hirshfield