Quotes by Jane Hirshfield

“Hope is the hardest love we carry.”

“One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.”

“as some strings, untouched,sound when no one is speaking.So it was when love slipped inside us.”

“Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.”

“One way poetry connects is across time. . . . Some echo of a writer's physical experience comes into us when we read her poem.”

“The heart's actionsare neither the sentence nor its reprieve. Salt hay and thistles, above the cold granite. One bird singing back to another because it can't not.”

“To plunge one thing into the shape or nature of another is a fundamental gesture of creative insight, part of how we make for ourselves a world more expansive, deft, fertile, and startling in richn...”

“Age in itself gives substance what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem's increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkening...”

“Standing DeerAs the house of a personin age sometimes grows clutteredwith what istoo loved or too heavy to part with,the heart may grow cluttered.And still the house will be emptied,and still the h...”

“Perimeter is not meaning, but it changes meaning,/as wit increases distance, and compassion erodes it.”

“In a room with many windowssome thoughts slide past uncatchable, ghostly.”

“It is, of course, we who house poems as much as their words, and we ourselves must be the locus of poetry's depth of newness. Still, the permeability seems to travel both ways: a changed self will ...”

“Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.”

“TreeIt is foolishto let a young redwoodgrow 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-tip...”

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

“Age in itself gives substance — what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem's increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkenin...”

“Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.”