Jane Hirshfield quotes

You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life. (Jane Hirshfield)
Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.
Jane Hirshfield
How fragile we are, between the few good moments.
Jane Hirshfield
At some point I realized that you don't get a full human life if you try to cut off one end of it, that you need to agree to the entire experience, to the full spectrum of what happens.
Jane Hirshfield
I see poetry as a path toward new understanding and transformation, and so I've looked at specific poems I love, and at poetry's gestures in the broadest sense, in an effort to feel and learn what they offer from the inside.
Jane Hirshfield
One reason to write a poem is to flush from the deep thickets of the self some thought, feeling, comprehension, question, music, you didn't know was in you, or in the world.
Jane Hirshfield
You can't write an image, a metaphor, a story, a phrase, without leaning a little further into the shared world, without recognizing that your supposed solitude is at every point of its perimeter touching some other.
Jane Hirshfield
Poetry is a release of something previously unknown into the visible. You write to invite that, to make of yourself a gathering of the unexpected and, with luck, of the unexpectable.
Jane Hirshfield
Neither a person entirely broken nor one entirely whole can speak. In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.
Jane Hirshfield
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
One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen. (Jane Hirshfield)
I feel like I am in the service of the poem. The poem isn't something I make. The poem is something I serve.
Jane Hirshfield
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