211 Quotes by Jane Hirshfield

Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am.

Zen is less the study of doctrine than a set of tools for discovering what can be known when the world is looked at with open eyes.

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.

Zen pretty much comes down to three things – everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.

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.

In order to gain anything, you must first lose everything.

Good poems ask us to have complex minds and hearts. Even simple-of-surface poems want that. Perhaps those are the ones that want it most of all, since that’s where they do their work: in the unspoken complexities, understood off the page.

Tree It is foolish to let a young redwood grow 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-tips brush at the window. Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

At another level, though, poems can craft an eraser – we can’t revise the past, but poems allow us some malleability, an increased freedom of response, comprehension, feeling. Choice, what choices are possible for any given person, is another theme that’s run through my work from the start.