211 Quotes by Jane Hirshfield

How fragile we are, between the few good moments.

those who follow their own breath will come to know both Being's nature and their own.

What is usual is not what is always.As sometimes, in old age, hearing comes back.Footsteps resume their clipped edges,birds quiet for decades migrate back to the ear.Where were they? By what route did they return?A woman mute for yearsforms one perfect sentence before she dies.

Little soul,you have wanderedlost a long time.

The Cloudy VasePast time, I threw the flowers out,washed out the cloudy vase.How easily the old clearnessleapt, like a practiced tiger, back inside it.

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 of an old painting become part of its luminosity in the viewer’s mind.

The work of existence devours its own unfolding.What dissolves will dissolve--you, reader, and I, and all our quick angers and longings.

As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty, we become our choices.

To Hear the Falling WorldOnly if I move my arm a certain way,it comes back.Or the way the light bends in the treesthis time of year,so a scrap of sorrow, like a bird, lights on the heart.I carry this in my body, seedin an unswept corner, husk-encowled and seeming safe.But they guard me, these small pains,from growing sureof myself and perhaps forgetting.