Jane Hirshfield Quotes - Page 4

Quotes about:

• In the dictionary of Cat, mercy is missing.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Cat, Missing, Mercy

  9 Copy quote

• An ordinary hole beside a path through the woods might begin to open to altered worlds.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Might, Woods, Path

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

  4 Copy quote

• Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Time

  4 Copy quote

• Poems' deep work is a matter of language, but also a matter of life. One part of that work is to draw into our awareness and into language itself the unobvious and the unexpected.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Matter, Unexpected, Language

  Source: www.americanmicroreviews.com

  4 Copy quote

• Good poems ask us to have complex minds and hearts. Even simple-of-surface poems want that. Perhaps those are the ones that want it most of all, since that's where they do their work: in the unspoken complexities, understood off the page.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Heart, Simple, Mind

  Source: www.americanmicroreviews.com

  4 Copy quote

• A poem can use anything to talk about anything.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Use

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

  4 Copy quote

• Houses are fundamental metaphors for self, world, permeability, transition, interiority, exteriority, multiplicity, and the power to move from one state of being to another.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Moving, Self, House

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

  10 Copy quote

• So much of our lives depends on accidents of birth, time, and geography. This haunts me. In some lives, few "or"s are possible. The pain of that is behind the second stanza of this poem.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Pain, Birth, Geography

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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Dream, Night, House

  7 Copy quote

• The pressed oil of words can blaze up into music, into image, into the heart and mind's knowledge. The lit and shadowed places within us can be warmed.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Heart, Oil, Mind

  4 Copy quote

• In my poems though, as you say, the comic arrived fairly late. This doubtless has something to do with growing older. A person who's seen a bit of the world can't help but notice how foolish is the self-centeredness we bring to our tiny slice of existence.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Self, Centeredness, World

  Source: www.americanmicroreviews.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Exercise, Perspective

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

  4 Copy quote

• I once was asked to contribute to a mushroom poem anthology. I didn't have anything, and so instead ended up writing the introduction. I think that request made me more alert to mushrooms, and now they've cropped up in my work, the way mushrooms themselves do after rain, quite a lot. But I've only just now taken up mushroom hunting, after going to a class offered at my local library.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Taken, Rain, Writing

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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Looks, Littles, Intimacy

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Artist, Color, Play

  Source: www.americanmicroreviews.com

  4 Copy quote

• There is no paradise, no place of true completion
  that does not include within its walls the unknown.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Wall, Doe, Paradise

  Jane Hirshfield (2015). “Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World”, p.103, Knopf

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Eye, Doctrine, Tools

  Jane Hirshfield (2015). “Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World”, p.57, Knopf

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Singing, Matter, Firsts

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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Hands, Shapes, Might

  Source: www.sfgate.com

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Past, Doors, Feelings

  FaceBook post by Jane Hirshfield from Mar 13, 2015

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Grief, Joy, Poetry

  Jane Hirshfield (2015). “Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World”, p.178, Knopf

  9 Copy quote

• The same words come from each mouth differently.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Mouths

  4 Copy quote

• I will never become a horse trainer, a biologist, a person competent with a hammer. My loves were my loves.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Horse, Hammers, Trainers

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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Horse, Two, Phones

  Jane Hirshfield (2011). “Come, Thief: Poems”, p.47, Knopf

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Discovery, Essentials, Needs

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

  4 Copy quote

Page 4 of 5

First

← Prev

1

2

3

4

5

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin