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“You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.”
-- Jane Hirshfield
#Stories #May #Begin Again
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“How fragile we are, between the few good moments.”
-- Jane Hirshfield
#Moments
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“Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.”
-- Jane Hirshfield
#Three #Attention #Pay
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“How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.”
-- Jane Hirshfield
#Heart
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“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
#Moving #Writing #Goal
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“One way poetry connects is across time. . . . Some echo of a writer's physical experience comes into us when we read her poem.”
-- Jane Hirshfield
#Echoes #Way
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“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
#Looks #Littles #Intimacy
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“In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.”
-- Jane Hirshfield
#Fearless #Sorrow
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“Life is short. But desire, desire is long.”
-- Jane Hirshfield
#Life Is Short #Long #Desire
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“I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With every new poem, an emotion new to the heart, to the world, speaks itself into being.”
-- Jane Hirshfield
#Writing #Heart #Ideas
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“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
#Heart #Roots #Tree
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“One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.”
-- Jane Hirshfield
#Taken #Moments #Anything Can Happen
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“Gestation requires protected space; ripening requires both permeability to the outer — and non-disturbance.”
-- Jane Hirshfield
#Space #Gestation #Ripening
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“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
#Light #Doors #Snow
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“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
#Truth #People #Stories
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“The untranslatable thought must be the most precise.”
-- Jane Hirshfield
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“Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.”
-- Jane Hirshfield
#Oil #Soul #Solitude
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“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
#Eye #Doctrine #Tools
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“Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.”
-- Jane Hirshfield
#Reality #Tasks #Increase
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“As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.”
-- Jane Hirshfield
#Horse #Life Is #This Life
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“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
#Voice #Heartless #Trying
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“Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.”
-- Jane Hirshfield
#Magnification #Clarification
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“as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.”
-- Jane Hirshfield
#Sound #Strings
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“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.”
-- Jane Hirshfield
#Lying #Love You #Moving
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“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
#Book #Tree #House
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“Neither a person entirely broken nor one entirely whole can speak. In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.”
-- Jane Hirshfield
#Broken #Fearless #Sorrow
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“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
#Horse #Two #Phones
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“What lives in words is what words were needed to learn.”
-- Jane Hirshfield
#Needed
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“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
#Dream #Night #House
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“The creative is always an act of recombination, with something added by new juxtaposition—as making a spark requires two things struck together.”
-- Jane Hirshfield
#Creativity #Two #Creative
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