Jane Hirshfield Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• 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

  Moving, Writing, Want

  "Of Amplitude There Is No Scraping Bottom: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield". Interview with Rebecca Olson, tinhouse.com. March 16, 2015.

  8 Copy quote

• Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Silence, Expansion, Concentration

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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

  Real, Mean, Simple

  Source: www.americanmicroreviews.com

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• Gestation requires protected space; ripening requires both permeability to the outer — and non-disturbance.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Space, Gestation, Ripening

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• Poetry's work is not simply the recording of inner or outer perception; it makes by words and music new possibilities of perceiving

  Jane Hirshfield

  Perception, Possibility, Words And Music

  Jane Hirshfield (2015). “Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World”, p.8, Knopf

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• Any woodthrush shows it - he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Bird, World, Shows

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• 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

  Art, Discovery, Ordinary

  Source: www.sfgate.com

  13 Copy quote

• One recurring dream, many others have also: you go into a familiar house, discover a door or hallway, and find the house continues into hidden rooms. Sometimes a whole second house is there, a larger and unknown extension of the familiar dwelling.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Dream, Doors, Dwelling

  "Of Amplitude There Is No Scraping Bottom: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield". Interview with Rebecca Olson, tinhouse.com. March 16, 2015.

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• 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

  Real, Passion, Thinking

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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

  Long, Silence, Forests

  "Of Amplitude There Is No Scraping Bottom: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield". Interview with Rebecca Olson, tinhouse.com. March 16, 2015.

  4 Copy quote

• So few the grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Dark, Joy, Balance

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• Some questions cannot be answered. They become familiar weights in the hand, round stones pulled from the pocket, unyielding and cool.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Hands, Stones, Pockets

  Jane Hirshfield (2011). “Of Gravity & Angels”, p.13, Wesleyan University Press

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• Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own way of working.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Shadow Work, Shadow, Way

  "Of Amplitude There Is No Scraping Bottom: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield". Interview with Rebecca Olson, tinhouse.com. March 16, 2015.

  4 Copy quote

• Isn't the small and common the field we live our life in? The large comes into a life through small-paned windows. A breath is small, but everything depends on it. A person looks at you a single, brief moment longer than is necessary, and everything is changed. The smaller the clue, the larger the meaning, it sometimes feels.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Looks, Fields, Common

  Source: www.americanmicroreviews.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  People, Silence, Listening

  "Of Amplitude There Is No Scraping Bottom: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield". Interview with Rebecca Olson, tinhouse.com. March 16, 2015.

  4 Copy quote

• I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With every new poem, an emotion new to the heart, to the world, speaks itself into being.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Writing, Heart, Ideas

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• 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

  Writing, Thinking, Osmosis

  "Of Amplitude There Is No Scraping Bottom: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield". Interview with Rebecca Olson, tinhouse.com. March 16, 2015.

  8 Copy quote

• Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Reality, Tasks, Increase

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• The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Moon, Darkness, Cold

  Jane Hirshfield (2011). “Come, Thief: Poems”, p.28, Knopf

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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

  Broken, Fearless, Sorrow

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• Life is short.
  But desire, desire is long.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Life Is Short, Long, Desire

  Jane Hirshfield (2011). “Of Gravity & Angels”, p.18, Wesleyan University Press

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• Time-awareness does indeed watermark my books and my life.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Book, Doe, Awareness

  "Of Amplitude There Is No Scraping Bottom: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield". Interview with Rebecca Olson, tinhouse.com. March 16, 2015.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Artist, Luxury, Important

  "Of Amplitude There Is No Scraping Bottom: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield". Interview with Rebecca Olson, tinhouse.com. March 16, 2015.

  7 Copy quote

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

  Jane Hirshfield

  Morning, Lasts, Firsts

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• In the dictionary of Cat, mercy is missing.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Cat, Missing, Mercy

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