Jane Hirshfield Quotes & Sayings

“You can't write an image, a metaphor, a story, a phrase, without leaning a little further into the shared world, without recognizing that your supposed solitude is at every point of its perimeter touching some other.”

“One reason to write a poem is to flush from the deep thickets of the self some thought, feeling, comprehension, question, music, you didn't know was in you, or in the world.”

“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.”

“Poetry is a release of something previously unknown into the visible. You write to invite that, to make of yourself a gathering of the unexpected and, with luck, of the unexpectable.”

“I feel like I am in the service of the poem. The poem isn't something I make. The poem is something I serve.”

“I see poetry as a path toward new understanding and transformation, and so I've looked at specific poems I love, and at poetry's gestures in the broadest sense, in an effort to feel and learn what they offer from the inside.”

“My job as a human being as well as a writer is to feel as thoroughly as possible the experience that I am part of, and then press it a little further.”

“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.”

“What we want from art is whatever is missing from the lives we are already living and making. Something is always missing, and so art-making is endless.”