211 Quotes by Jane Hirshfield

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.

Poems . . . are perfume bottles momentarily unstopped—what they release is volatile and will vanish, and yet it can be released again,

How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.

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

This garden is no metaphor - more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can.

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.

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.

The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.

History, mythology, and folktales are filled with stories of people punished for saying the truth. Only the Fool, exempt from society's rules, is allowed to speak with complete freedom.