211 Quotes by Jane Hirshfield

To plunge one thing into the shape or nature of another is a fundamental gesture of creative insight, part of how we make for ourselves a world more expansive, deft, fertile, and startling in richness.

Perimeter is not meaning, but it changes meaning,/as wit increases distance, and compassion erodes it.

If the blue morning held in the glass of the window,if my fingers, my palms. If my thighs.If your hands, if my thighs.If the seeds, among all the lost gold oft the grass.If your hands on my thighs, if your tongue.If the leaves. If the singing fell upward. If grief.For a moment if singing and grief.If the blue of the body fell upward, out of our hands.If the morning held it like leaves.

Evolution tells us how to survive; art tells us how it's possible still to live even while knowing that we and all we love will someday vanish. It says there's beauty even in grief, freedom even inside the strictures of form and of life. What's liberating isn't what's simplest; it's the ability to include more and more shadows, colors and possibilities inside any moment's meeting of self and world.

There is no paradise, no place of true completion that does not include within its walls the unknown.

The secret of understanding poetry is to hear poetry's words as what they are: the full self's most intimate speech, half waking, half dream. You listen to a poem as you might listen to someone you love who tells you their truest day. Their words might weep, joke, whirl, leap. What's unspoken in the words will still be heard. It's also the way we listen to music: You don't look for extractable meaning, but to be moved.

A poem's essential discovery can happen at a single sitting. The cascade of discoveries in an essay, or even finding a question worth exploring in one, seems to need roughly the time it takes to plant and harvest a crop of bush beans.

It's one of the saving graces in a life, to be able to perceive one's own and others' absurdity, to notice our shared human frailties and be able, at least some of the time, to smile rather than grimace. Like most people, I must have started out with a comic worldview in my cupboard.

Art keeps its newness because it's at once unforgettable and impossible to remember entirely. Art is too volatile, multiple and evaporative to hold on to. It's more chemical reaction, one you have to re-create each time, than a substance. Art's discoveries are also, almost always, counter to ordinary truths.