211 Quotes by Jane Hirshfield

You must try, the voice said, to become colder. I understood at once. It’s like the bodies of gods: cast in bronze, braced in stone. Only something heartless could bear the full weight.

Think assailable thoughts, or be lonely.

The heft of a life in the hands grows both lighter and weightier. Over time, my life has become more saturated with its shape and made-ness, while my poems have become more and more free. The first word of every poem might be “Yes.” The next words: “And then.”

The trick, though, is to not lose compassion, to not allow the sense of absurdity to outweigh the awareness of real beings, with real feelings. Mean-spirited humor turns the world into cardboard, the way Midas’s simple-minded greed turned food into inedible and useless stuff.

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.

The experience of an enlarged intimacy is not the only reason to want art in our lives, but it is a central reason. The windows that break open the boundaries of a poem, piece of music, or painting do the same work: they awaken and give entrance to what might otherwise not be recognized, felt, or known as inseparably part of the story.

Hope is the hardest love we carry.

I’d say that the middle stanza is closer: that’s the place where the poem ranges unexpectedly into a different realm.

So much of our lives depends on accidents of birth, time, and geography. This haunts me. In some lives, few “or”s are possible. The pain of that is behind the second stanza of this poem.