Words are not the end of thought, they are where it begins. Jane Hirshfield More Quotes by Jane Hirshfield More Quotes From Jane Hirshfield In order to gain anything, you must first lose everything Jane Hirshfield gainsorderfirsts Art keeps its newness because it's at once unforgettable and impossible to remember entirely. Art is too volatile, multiple and evaporative to hold on to. It's more chemical reaction, one you have to re-create each time, than a substance. Art's discoveries are also, almost always, counter to ordinary truths. Jane Hirshfield ordinarydiscoveryart Here are poems from a new generation of writers who honor the magnetic fields of the real; who feel and think with full and open-eyed passion; who focus heat as the magnifying glass focuses sun: until the paper catches. Read them. Jane Hirshfield passionrealthinking 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 simplesecretwater 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 silenceforestslong What lives in words is what words were needed to learn. Jane Hirshfield needed Your fate is to be yourself, both punishment and crime. Jane Hirshfield punishmentbeing-yourselffate Time-awareness does indeed watermark my books and my life. Jane Hirshfield awarenessdoebook As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it. Jane Hirshfield this-lifehorselife-is Tree It is foolish to let a young redwood grow next to a house. Even in this one lifetime, you will have to choose. That great calm being, this clutter of soup pots and books-- Already the first branch-tips brush at the window. Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life. Jane Hirshfield housetreebook Poems . . . are perfume bottles momentarily unstopped - what they release is volatile and will vanish, and yet it can be released again. Jane Hirshfield perfumereleasebottles Any artist, in any field, wants to press deeper, to discover further. Image and sound play are among the strongest colors available to poetry's palette. For a long time, I've wanted to invite in more strangeness, more freedom of imagination. Yet music, seeing, and meaning are also cohering disciplines. They can be stretched, and that is part of poetry's helium pleasure. But not to the point of breaking. Jane Hirshfield colorartistplay 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 taughttryingattention Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said. Jane Hirshfield increasetasksreality 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. Jane Hirshfield intimacylittleslooks Neither a person entirely broken nor one entirely whole can speak. In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble. Jane Hirshfield fearlesssorrowbroken I thought I would love you forever—and, a little, I may, in the way I still move toward a crate, knees bent, or reach for a man: as one might stretch for the three or four fruit that lie in the sun at the top of the tree; too ripe for any moment but this, they open their skin at first touch, yielding sweetness, sweetness and heat, and in me, each time since, the answering yes. Jane Hirshfield love-youlyingmoving The heat of autumn Jane Hirshfield autumnapplessummer One way poetry connects is across time. . . . Some echo of a writer's physical experience comes into us when we read her poem. Jane Hirshfield one-wayechoesway At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink. What I've chosen, what's happened unchosen, can't be unmade or redone. Poetry, though, is a door that only continues to open. Even the unchangeable past changes inside a poem. Not the facts, but the feeling, the comprehension. Jane Hirshfield feelingsdoorspast
