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Jane Hirshfield Quotes

Poet

Jane Hirshfield is an American poet known for her concise and profound poetry. Born on February 24, 1953, she has gained widespread recognition in the literary world since the 1980s.

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Famous Jane Hirshfield Quotes

“Whatever handcuffs the soul, I have brought here.”

Soul Poetry Poem Handicaps

Book:Ledger: Poems

Source: Ledger: Poems

“A burst pipe can be fixed with practical knowledge, materials, working hands and working will. For other crises – the kind not amenable to immediate and practical solution, the kind before which a person may feel almost entirely powerless – what’s needed is something else, something that lives in art, story, music, myth, poems. Call it company; call it caliper; call it compass.”

Art Poetry Music Poem Myth Poems Story Problems Crises

Author:Jane Hirshfield

“Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace. Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder.”

Joy Poetry Change Poem

Book:The Asking: New and Selected Poems

Source: The Asking: New and Selected Poems

“In both, today, are turnips, rotund orators, ventriloquists of the vanished. I have cut into one and pondered the inner brightness, made of almost nothing but being alive.”

Life Poetry Produce Poem Living Vegetables Turnips

Author:Jane Hirshfield

“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.”

Poetry Choices Change Evolution Poem Decisions Immensity Slow Change

Book:Given Sugar, Given Salt

Source: Given Sugar, Given Salt

“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.”

Art Age Poetry History Painting Value Persistence Conservation

Book:Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry

Source: Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry

“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.”

Self Poetry Meaning

Author:Jane Hirshfield

“There is more and more I tell no one, strangers nor loves. This slips into the heart without hurry, as if it had never been. And yet, among the trees, something has changed. Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am.”

Self Feelings Poetry Poem Thoughts Secrets

Book:The lives of the heart

Source: The lives of the heart

“In a room with many windows some thoughts slide past uncatchable, ghostly.”

Poetry Thoughts

Book:The Beauty

Source: The Beauty

“As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty, we become our choices.”

Life Poetry Choices Poems

Book:Given Sugar, Given Salt

Source: Given Sugar, Given Salt

“The world asks, as it asks daily: And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured? I count, this first day of another year, what remains. I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands.”

Poetry Poem Resolutions New Year S Resolutions New Year S Day

Book:The Asking: New and Selected Poems

Source: The Asking: New and Selected Poems

“Poetry now, here, is not taken so seriously, or noticed so widely. But, however few who may now look to them, poems still can be felt as needed, felt as one way to give needed name to things that need naming.”

Needs Writing Feelings Poetry Understanding Poem Poems

Author:Jane Hirshfield

“A horse’s field of vision, with both large eyes open, covers three hundred and fifty degrees. Only a little is missing. A few inches directly in front of the face, a sliver behind the tail. Sometimes an era, a country, turns into a horse. A plunging forward. Its own stinging bee that it flees. Denying future and past, trampling people as if they were pliable grasses.”

Poetry Politics Nations Poem Chaos Horses Blinders Countries

Author:Jane Hirshfield

“Americans aren’t accustomed to reading poems as words written to slip past a censor; readers in other places and times have read poetry that way always.”

Writing America Poetry Poem Activism Censorship Americans Censors

Author:Jane Hirshfield

“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.”

Joy Poetry Grief Path Bears Perceive Abundance Insult Surprising Tolls Transience

Book:Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World

Source: Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World

About the Author

Born: February 24, 1953
Known for: Poet
Quotes: 142

Books & Sources

Come, Thief: PoemsRelated source material

The lives of the heartRelated source material

Of Gravity & AngelsRelated source material

Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the WorldRelated source material

Given Sugar, Given SaltRelated source material

After: PoemsRelated source material

Ledger: PoemsRelated source material

The Asking: New and Selected PoemsRelated source material

Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of PoetryRelated source material

The BeautyRelated source material

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