211 Quotes by Jane Hirshfield

As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.

In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.

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

There is a door. It opens. Then it is closed. But a slip of light stays, like a scrap of unreadable paper left on the floor, or the one red leaf the snow releases in March

A tree lives on its roots. If you change the root, you change the tree. Culture lives in human beings. If you change the human heart the culture will follow.

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

I've gone to Yaddo many times, I've worked at the Rockefeller Foundation's Center for Scholars and Artists in Bellagio. That these are places of beauty and of changed landscape is helpful - but far more important for me is that they offer what I feel as a monastic luxury: undisturbed time.

Between certainty and the real, an ancient enmity.

The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness.