Notable Quotes
Browse quotes by subject | Browse quotes by author


JANE HIRSHFIELD QUOTES II

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

Metaphors think with the imagination and the senses. The hot chili peppers in them explode in the mouth and the mind.

JANE HIRSHFIELD, "The Art of Metaphor"

Metaphors get under your skin by ghosting right past the logical mind.

JANE HIRSHFIELD, "The Art of Metaphor"

Between certainty and the real, an ancient enmity.

JANE HIRSHFIELD, "Against Certainty"

Every morning is new as the last one, uncreased
as the not quite imaginable first.

JANE HIRSHFIELD, "Sky: An Assay"

For me, a good poem is a poem that leaves me feeling transformed, enlarged rather than narrowed, with a greater sense of my own existence and the existence of others, with a greater capacity for being a kite available to many winds and still able to stay aloft. Good poetry is a recognizable experience, but hard to name in generality, because so many different strategies can create it. Its own awareness is also part of what creates it. Poetry makes poetry.

JANE HIRSHFIELD, interview, Poetry Northwest, July 11, 2015

Your fate is to be yourself, both punishment and crime.

JANE HIRSHFIELD, "Envy: An Assay"

The untranslatable thought must be the most precise.

JANE HIRSHFIELD, "After Long Silence"

A person is full of sorrow
the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.

JANE HIRSHFIELD, "Burlap Sack"

The heat of autumn
is different from the heat of summer.
One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider.

JANE HIRSHFIELD, "The Heat of Autumn"

Let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly
Spoken and silent, surprise you inside your ears
Sleeping and waking, unfold itself inside your eyes
Let its fierceness and tenderness hold you
Let its vastness be undisguised in all your days.

JANE HIRSHFIELD, "A Blessing for Wedding", Come, Thief: Poems

A good question can send you on a long journey in rain and cold. It can terrify, bringing you straight into your own fears, whether of heights or of loss or of all the mysteries that never go away--our own vulnerability, the heart's utter exposure, the capriciousness and fragility of events, of relationships, of existence.

JANE HIRSHFIELD, "Living by Questions", Oprah

Never surrender a good question for a mere answer.

JANE HIRSHFIELD, "Living by Questions", Oprah

In times of darkness and direness, a good question can become a safety rope between you and your own sense of selfhood: A person who asks a question is not wholly undone by events. She is there to face them, to meet them. If you’re asking a question, you still believe in a future.

JANE HIRSHFIELD, "Living by Questions", Oprah

Poetry, and art in general, often counterbalance the main tenor of a culture. They carry different truths, as the Fool does in the court of a king. They puncture power and purpose’s narrowing of view. We lean towards the purposive and practical, not just as humans, but as mammals. Poetry reveals another set of values, which equally matter, and make life bearable in ways that it otherwise would not be. Kindness, astonishment, seeing the beauty in darkness and grief, seeing the darkness in beauty and joy, finding solace in the knowledge that you live a life others have also known. Utilitarianism alone is a cruel and strictured measure of a life.

JANE HIRSHFIELD, interview, Poetry Northwest, July 11, 2015

The facts were told not to speak
and were taken away.
The facts, surprised to be taken, were silent.

JANE HIRSHFIELD, "On the Fifth Day"

Little soul,
you and I will become
the memory
of a memory of a memory.
A horse
released of the traces
forgets the weight of the wagon.

JANE HIRSHFIELD, "Harness"

One of the current great problems in the world is fundamentalism of every kind -- political, spiritual -- and poetry is an antidote to fundamentalism. Poetry is about the clarities that you find when you don't simplify. Poetry is about complexity, nuance, subtlety. Poems also create larger fields of possibility. The imagination is limitless, so even when a person is confronted with an unchangeable outer circumstance, one thing poems give you is the sense that there's always, still, a changeability, a malleability, of inner circumstance. That's the beginning of freedom.

JANE HIRSHFIELD, "How can poems transform the world? A chat with poet Jane Hirshfield.", Washington Post, May 13, 2015

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs--all this resinous, unretractable earth.

JANE HIRSHFIELD, "Optimism"

I waited though wanting nothing,
then waited longer.

JANE HIRSHFIELD, "Lure"

Lucky the one who writes in a book of spiral-bound mornings
a future in ink, who writes hand unshaking

JANE HIRSHFIELD, "Sweater"

Little soul,
you have wandered
lost a long time.
The woods all dark now,
birded and eyed.
Then a light, a cabin, a fire, a door standing open.

JANE HIRSHFIELD, "Amor Fati"

Where you find poems in most people's lives is at weddings and at funerals. Poems are turned to in the great transitions of a life, when we are at sea amid changes too vast to feel in any way the master of. One of the things poems do is demonstrate that you aren't alone -- that other humans have been here before, and have found a way to sustain aliveness, to find beauty within the condition of grief. And this allows you to go on.

JANE HIRSHFIELD, "How can poems transform the world? A chat with poet Jane Hirshfield.", Washington Post, May 13, 2015

What lives in words is what words were needed to learn.

JANE HIRSHFIELD, "To Speech"


SHARE QUOTES WITH FRIENDS!


Life Quotes

Love Quotes

Death Quotes

God Quotes

Wisdom Quotes

Hope Quotes

Success Quotes

Women Quotes

Happiness Quotes

Shakespeare Quotes