211 Quotes by Jane Hirshfield

Gestation requires protected space; ripening requires both permeability to the outer – and non-disturbance.

Desire is the moment before the race is run.

Any woodthrush shows it – he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled.

It’s more for me as with going into a forest: if you sit quietly for a long time, the life around you emerges. As the world grows ever more clamorous, my hunger for silence steepens. I unplug the landline.

The writing of an assay-type poem or a poem investigating perspective isn’t an exercise of rational or strategic mind. Poems for me are acts of small or large desperation. They grapple with surfaces too steep to walk in any other way, yet which have to be traveled.

In the dream life you don’t deliberately set out to dream about a house night after night; the dream itself insists you look at whatever is trying to come into visibility.

The desire of monks and mystics is not unlike that of artists: to perceive the extraordinary within the ordinary by changing not the world but the eyes that look.

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.

When I write, I don’t know what is going to emerge. I begin in a condition of complete unknowing, an utter nakedness of concept or goal. A word appears, another word appears, an image. It is a moving into mystery.