Jane Hirshfield Quotes

Immensity is always there, but we so often become numb to it, or deceive ourselves into thinking our own lives and selves are what’s large. Step into the ocean or walk on Mount Tamalpais, and that kind of amnesia and self-centeredness isn’t possible. Enter the natural world at all, you see existence emerge, ripen, fall and continue, and you can’t help but feel more tender towards self and others. That summoning into the large and the shared is what poems exist also to do.

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

Neither a person entirely broken nor one entirely whole can speak. In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.

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.

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

Poetry’s work is the clarification and magnification of being.

At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink.

Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.

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.

I travel as much as I do. It isn’t the life I expected. I don’t know what dust of pollen will come back with me from these travels.But I must trust that I will not treat frivolously the glimpses I’ve been given into other places and others’ lives.

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.

I don’t work on poems and essays at once. They walk on different legs, speak with different tongues, draw from different parts of the psyche. Their paces are also different.