Top 100 Jane Hirshfield Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “I need more and more silence, it feels. Poems don’t leap into my mind when I’m distracted, turned outward, with other people, listening to music.”

— Jane Hirshfield

53. “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.”

— Jane Hirshfield

54. “So much of our lives depends on accidents of birth, time, and geography. This haunts me. In some lives, few “or”s are possible. The pain of that is behind the second stanza of this poem.”

— Jane Hirshfield

55. “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.”

— Jane Hirshfield

56. “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

57. “It is, of course, we who house poems as much as their words, and we ourselves must be the locus of poetry’s depth of newness. Still, the permeability seems to travel both ways: a changed self will find new meanings in a good poem, but a good poem also changes the shape of the self.”

— Jane Hirshfield

58. “Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags, being careful between the trees to leave extra room.”

— Jane Hirshfield

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

— Jane Hirshfield

60. “Your fate is to be yourself, both punishment and crime.”

— Jane Hirshfield

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

— Jane Hirshfield

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

— Jane Hirshfield

63. “The trick, though, is to not lose compassion, to not allow the sense of absurdity to outweigh the awareness of real beings, with real feelings. Mean-spirited humor turns the world into cardboard, the way Midas’s simple-minded greed turned food into inedible and useless stuff.”

— Jane Hirshfield

64. “At another level, though, poems can craft an eraser – we can’t revise the past, but poems allow us some malleability, an increased freedom of response, comprehension, feeling. Choice, what choices are possible for any given person, is another theme that’s run through my work from the start.”

— Jane Hirshfield

65. “Wherever the gaze rests, art will draw it also elsewhere, will remind that there is always more. Alice does not stop and face her own reflection in the looking-glass: she travels through it.”

— Jane Hirshfield

66. “Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy.”

— Jane Hirshfield

67. “Desire is the moment before the race is run.”

— Jane Hirshfield

68. “Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.”

— Jane Hirshfield

69. “Here is a soul, accepting nothing.”

— Jane Hirshfield

70. “One useful way to approach a haiku is to understand each of its parts as pointing toward both world and self. Read this way, haiku remind that a person should not become too fixed in a singular sense of what the self might consist of or know, or where it might reside.”

— Jane Hirshfield

71. “Think assailable thoughts, or be lonely.”

— Jane Hirshfield

72. “The thought that something we cannot see, of unsurpassable skill and unimaginable form, exists in the back room’s locked safe – isn’t this, for any artist, for any person, an irresistible hope, beautiful and disturbing as the distant baying of Thoreau’s lost hound that tells us, not least, that the mysteries of distance are endless?”

— Jane Hirshfield

73. “Words are not the end of thought, they are where it begins.”

— Jane Hirshfield

74. “One recurring dream, many others have also: you go into a familiar house, discover a door or hallway, and find the house continues into hidden rooms. Sometimes a whole second house is there, a larger and unknown extension of the familiar dwelling.”

— Jane Hirshfield

75. “Sam Hamill is a writer unabashedly taking his place within the community of literature and the community of all sentient beings-his fidelity is to the magnificent truth of existence, and to its commensurate singing.”

— Jane Hirshfield

76. “I will never become a horse trainer, a biologist, a person competent with a hammer. My loves were my loves.”

— Jane Hirshfield

77. “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.”

— Jane Hirshfield

78. “In my poems though, as you say, the comic arrived fairly late. This doubtless has something to do with growing older. A person who’s seen a bit of the world can’t help but notice how foolish is the self-centeredness we bring to our tiny slice of existence.”

— Jane Hirshfield

79. “I want to understand the piers of language and music and comprehension that can hold up a building even when what the building houses is an earthquake. This thinking must surely come into the poems I write, but more by osmosis than will.”

— Jane Hirshfield

80. “To plunge one thing into the shape or nature of another is a fundamental gesture of creative insight, part of how we make for ourselves a world more expansive, deft, fertile, and startling in richness.”

— Jane Hirshfield

81. “The ability to name poetry’s gestures and rhetorics isn’t required to write or read them, any more than a painter needs to know the physics of color to bring forward a landscape. The eye and hand and ear know what they need to know. Some of us want to know more, because knowing pleases.”

— Jane Hirshfield

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

— Jane Hirshfield

83. “Let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly Spoken and silent, surprise you inside your ears Sleeping and waking, unfold itself inside your eyes Let its fierceness and tenderness hold you Let its vastness be undisguised in all your days.”

— Jane Hirshfield

84. “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.”

— Jane Hirshfield

85. “One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read – in such a moment, anything can happen.”

— Jane Hirshfield

86. “A certain amount of housekeeping also goes on in my poems. I wash doorknobs, do dishes, mop floors, patch carpets, cook.”

— Jane Hirshfield

87. “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.”

— Jane Hirshfield

88. “A person is full of sorrow the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.”

— Jane Hirshfield

89. “Every other year or so I go to one of those great generous places, the artist retreats. Some of the poems in The Beauty were written at the MacDowell Colony, in New Hampshire, and others at Civitella Ranieri, in Umbria.”

— Jane Hirshfield

90. “Justice lacking passion fails, betrays.”

— Jane Hirshfield

91. “Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called ‘shadow work,’ not least because that is no small part of their own way of working.”

— Jane Hirshfield

92. “A poem makes clear without making simple. Poetry’s language carries what lives outside language. It’s as if you were given a 5-gallon bucket with 10 gallons of water in it. Mysterious thirsts are answered. That alchemical bucket carries secrets also, even the ones we keep from ourselves.”

— Jane Hirshfield

93. “Passion does not make careful arguments: it declares itself, and that is enough.”

— Jane Hirshfield

94. “A poem’s essential discovery can happen at a single sitting. The cascade of discoveries in an essay, or even finding a question worth exploring in one, seems to need roughly the time it takes to plant and harvest a crop of bush beans.”

— Jane Hirshfield

95. “Go back to The October Palace, which came out in 1994, and there are poems with windows, doors, the rooms of the gorgeous and vanishing palace that is this ordinary world and ordinary life. Jungian archetype would say the house is a figure for the experienced, experiencing self.”

— Jane Hirshfield

96. “Here are poems from a new generation of writers who honor the magnetic fields of the real; who feel and think with full and open-eyed passion; who focus heat as the magnifying glass focuses sun: until the paper catches. Read them.”

— Jane Hirshfield

97. “The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness.”

— Jane Hirshfield

98. “If truth is the lure, humans are fishes.”

— Jane Hirshfield

99. “The heft of a life in the hands grows both lighter and weightier. Over time, my life has become more saturated with its shape and made-ness, while my poems have become more and more free. The first word of every poem might be “Yes.” The next words: “And then.””

— Jane Hirshfield

100. “I know I shouldn’t be writing haiku now, so close to my death. But poetry is all I’ve thought of for over fifty years. When I sleep, I dream about hurrying down a road under morning clouds or evening mist. When I awaken I’m captivated by the mountain stream’s interesting sounds or the calls of wild birds. Buddha called such attachment wrong, and of this I am guilty. But I cannot forget the haiku that have filled my life.”

— Jane Hirshfield