Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement. Jane Hirshfield More Quotes by Jane Hirshfield More Quotes From 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 osmosiswritingthinking The first poem in The Beauty holds a woman in Portugal in a wheelchair singing, with great power, a fado. I have never seen this or heard of it, the image simply arrived. But surely such a thing has happened. And it matters to me that it has, or could. Jane Hirshfield singingmatterfirsts 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 shapesmighthands If truth is the lure, humans are fishes. Jane Hirshfield fisheshumanstruth At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink. Jane Hirshfield inkmomentslife-is The untranslatable thought must be the most precise. Jane Hirshfield precise The same words come from each mouth differently. Jane Hirshfield mouths I will never become a horse trainer, a biologist, a person competent with a hammer. My loves were my loves. Jane Hirshfield trainershammershorse Life is short. Jane Hirshfield life-is-shortdesirelong The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness. Jane Hirshfield coldmoondarkness Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being. Jane Hirshfield magnificationclarification 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 truthstoriespeople Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy. Jane Hirshfield poetrygriefjoy I want to preserve a certain unknowing about my own poems - perhaps because unknowing is in itself a useful poetic thirst. To move the perimeter of saying outside my own boundaries is one reason I write. Jane Hirshfield wantwritingmoving 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. Jane Hirshfield lovetwopeople Gestation requires protected space; ripening requires both permeability to the outer — and non-disturbance. Jane Hirshfield gestationripeningspace There is a door. It opens. Then it is closed. But a slip of light stays, like a scrap of unreadable paper left on the floor, or the one red leaf the snow releases in March Jane Hirshfield lightdoorssnow I've gone to Yaddo many times, I've worked at the Rockefeller Foundation's Center for Scholars and Artists in Bellagio. That these are places of beauty and of changed landscape is helpful - but far more important for me is that they offer what I feel as a monastic luxury: undisturbed time. Jane Hirshfield luxuryimportantartist There are openings in our lives Jane Hirshfield our-livesopeningknows Every morning is new as the last one, uncreased as the not quite imaginable first. Jane Hirshfield lastsmorningfirsts
