Top 100 Jane Hirshfield Quotes (2025 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. “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

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

— Jane Hirshfield

8. “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

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

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

— Jane Hirshfield

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

— Jane Hirshfield

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

— Jane Hirshfield

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

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

— Jane Hirshfield

19. “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

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

— Jane Hirshfield

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

— Jane Hirshfield

29. “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

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

— Jane Hirshfield

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

— Jane Hirshfield

32. “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

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

— Jane Hirshfield

34. “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

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

— Jane Hirshfield

36. “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

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

— Jane Hirshfield

38. “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

39. “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

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

— Jane Hirshfield

41. “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

42. “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

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

— Jane Hirshfield

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

— Jane Hirshfield

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

— Jane Hirshfield

46. “How sad they are, the promises we never return to. They stay in our mouths, roughen the tongue, lead lives of their own.”

— Jane Hirshfield

47. “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

48. “And when two people have loved each other see how it is like a scar between their bodies, stronger, darker, and proud; how the black cord makes of them a single fabric that nothing can tear or mend.”

— Jane Hirshfield

49. “Age in itself gives substance – what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem’s increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkening of an old painting become part of its luminosity in the viewer’s mind.”

— Jane Hirshfield

50. “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.”

— Jane Hirshfield