Top 100 Jane Hirshfield Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Zen pretty much comes down to three things – everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.”

— Jane Hirshfield

2. “In order to gain anything, you must first lose everything.”

— Jane Hirshfield

3. “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.”

— Jane Hirshfield

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

— Jane Hirshfield

5. “How fragile we are, between the few good moments.”

— Jane Hirshfield

6. “Habit, laziness, and fear conspire to keep us comfortably within the familiar.”

— Jane Hirshfield

7. “Art-making is learned by immersion. You take in vocabularies of thought and feeling, grammar, diction, gesture, from the poems of others, and emerge with the power to turn language into a lathe for re-shaping, re-knowing your own tongue, heart, and life...”

— Jane Hirshfield

8. “Time-awareness does indeed watermark my books and my life.”

— Jane Hirshfield

9. “Zen taught me how to pay attention, how to delve, how to question and enter, how to stay with – or at least want to try to stay with – whatever is going on.”

— Jane Hirshfield

10. “Metaphors get under your skin by ghosting right past the logical mind.”

— Jane Hirshfield

11. “The heat of autumn is different from the heat of summer. One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider.”

— Jane Hirshfield

12. “Near even a candle, the visible heat. So it is with a person in love.”

— Jane Hirshfield

13. “Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.”

— Jane Hirshfield

14. “I want to preserve a certain unknowing about my own poems – perhaps because unknowing is in itself a useful poetic thirst. To move the perimeter of saying outside my own boundaries is one reason I write.”

— Jane Hirshfield

15. “The desire of monks and mystics is not unlike that of artists: to perceive the extraordinary within the ordinary by changing not the world but the eyes that look.”

— Jane Hirshfield

16. “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.”

— Jane Hirshfield

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

— Jane Hirshfield

18. “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.”

— Jane Hirshfield

19. “Gestation requires protected space; ripening requires both permeability to the outer – and non-disturbance.”

— Jane Hirshfield

20. “Between certainty and the real, an ancient enmity.”

— Jane Hirshfield

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

— Jane Hirshfield

22. “So few the grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.”

— Jane Hirshfield

23. “Houses are fundamental metaphors for self, world, permeability, transition, interiority, exteriority, multiplicity, and the power to move from one state of being to another.”

— Jane Hirshfield

24. “Poetry’s work is the clarification and magnification of being.”

— Jane Hirshfield

25. “The same words come from each mouth differently.”

— Jane Hirshfield

26. “Poetry’s work is not simply the recording of inner or outer perception; it makes by words and music new possibilities of perceiving.”

— Jane Hirshfield

27. “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.”

— Jane Hirshfield

28. “The nourishment of Cezanne’s awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.”

— Jane Hirshfield

29. “Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.”

— Jane Hirshfield

30. “The writing of an assay-type poem or a poem investigating perspective isn’t an exercise of rational or strategic mind. Poems for me are acts of small or large desperation. They grapple with surfaces too steep to walk in any other way, yet which have to be traveled.”

— Jane Hirshfield

31. “Some questions cannot be answered. They become familiar weights in the hand, round stones pulled from the pocket, unyielding and cool.”

— Jane Hirshfield

32. “Any woodthrush shows it – he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled.”

— Jane Hirshfield

33. “Good poems ask us to have complex minds and hearts. Even simple-of-surface poems want that. Perhaps those are the ones that want it most of all, since that’s where they do their work: in the unspoken complexities, understood off the page.”

— Jane Hirshfield

34. “Hunger that comes and goes turns time into memory.”

— Jane Hirshfield

35. “How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.”

— Jane Hirshfield

36. “The first poem in The Beauty holds a woman in Portugal in a wheelchair singing, with great power, a fado. I have never seen this or heard of it, the image simply arrived. But surely such a thing has happened. And it matters to me that it has, or could.”

— Jane Hirshfield

37. “Art can be defined as beauty able to transcend the circumstances of its making.”

— Jane Hirshfield

38. “It’s more for me as with going into a forest: if you sit quietly for a long time, the life around you emerges. As the world grows ever more clamorous, my hunger for silence steepens. I unplug the landline.”

— Jane Hirshfield

39. “Good art is a truing of vision, in the way a saw is trued in the saw shop, to cut more cleanly. It is also a changing of vision. Entering a good poem, a person feels, tastes, hears, thinks, and sees in altered ways. Why ask art into a life at all, if not to be transformed and enlarged by its presence and mysterious means?”

— Jane Hirshfield

40. “I’ve gone to Yaddo many times, I’ve worked at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Center for Scholars and Artists in Bellagio. That these are places of beauty and of changed landscape is helpful – but far more important for me is that they offer what I feel as a monastic luxury: undisturbed time.”

— Jane Hirshfield

41. “I don’t work on poems and essays at once. They walk on different legs, speak with different tongues, draw from different parts of the psyche. Their paces are also different.”

— Jane Hirshfield

42. “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.”

— Jane Hirshfield

43. “The moon and sun are travelers of a hundred generations. The years, coming and going, are wanderers too. Spending a lifetime adrift on boat decks, greeting old age while holding a horse by the mouth – for such a person, each day is a journey, and the journey itself becomes home.”

— Jane Hirshfield

44. “The untranslatable thought must be the most precise.”

— Jane Hirshfield

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

— Jane Hirshfield

46. “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.”

— Jane Hirshfield

47. “Metaphors think with the imagination and the senses. The hot chili peppers in them explode in the mouth and the mind.”

— Jane Hirshfield

48. “Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.”

— Jane Hirshfield

49. “Hope is the hardest love we carry.”

— Jane Hirshfield

50. “Poetry’s task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.”

— Jane Hirshfield