Explore Quotes by Jane Hirshfield

Life is short._x000D_ But desire, desire is long.

A tree lives on its roots. If you change the root, you change the tree. Culture lives in human beings. If you change the human heart the culture will follow.

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

One way poetry connects is across time. . . . Some echo of a writer's physical experience comes into us when we read her poem.

Zen is less the study of doctrine than a set of tools for discovering what can be known when the world is looked at with open eyes.

Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.

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.

This garden is no metaphor - more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can.

The heat of autumn_x000D_is different from the heat of summer. _x000D_One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider.

How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.

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

How fragile we are, between the few good moments.

Neither a person entirely broken nor one entirely whole can speak. In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.

You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.

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 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.

Everything has two endings- a horse, a piece of string, a phone call. Before a life, air. And after. As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.

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

Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.

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.

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