Jane Hirshfield

A studio, like a poem, is an intimacy and a freedom you can look out from, into each part of your life and a little beyond.

What we want from art is whatever is missing from the lives we are already living and making. Something is always missing, and so art-making is endless.

as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.

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.

I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With every new poem, an emotion new to the heart, to the world, speaks itself into being.

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

I thought I would love you forever—and, a little, I may, in the way I still move toward a crate, knees bent, or reach for a man: as one might stretch for the three or four fruit that lie in the sun at the top of the tree; too ripe for any moment but this, they open their skin at first touch, yielding sweetness, sweetness and heat, and in me, each time since, the answering yes.

Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.

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

There is no paradise, no place of true completion _x000D_ that does not include within its walls the unknown.

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.

In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.

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.

My job as a human being as well as a writer is to feel as thoroughly as possible the experience that I am part of, and then press it a little further.

One reason to write a poem is to flush from the deep thickets of the self some thought, feeling, comprehension, question, music, you didn't know was in you, or in the world.

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

One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.