Explore Quotes by Jane Hirshfield

You can't write an image, a metaphor, a story, a phrase, without leaning a little further into the shared world, without recognizing that your supposed solitude is at every point of its perimeter touching some other.

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.

At some point, I realized that you don't get a full human life if you try to cut off one end of it; that you need to agree to the entire experience, to the full spectrum of what happens.

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.

Poetry is a release of something previously unknown into the visible. You write to invite that, to make of yourself a gathering of the unexpected and, with luck, of the unexpectable.

I feel like I am in the service of the poem. The poem isn't something I make. The poem is something I serve.

I see poetry as a path toward new understanding and transformation, and so I've looked at specific poems I love, and at poetry's gestures in the broadest sense, in an effort to feel and learn what they offer from the inside.

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.

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

Poetry's work is not simply the recording of inner or outer perception; it makes by words and music new possibilities of perceiving

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

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

If truth is the lure, humans are fishes.

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.

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

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.

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

How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.

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.

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.

As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.