Jane Hirshfield Heart Quotations

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.

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.

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.

The pressed oil of words can blaze up into music, into image, into the heart and mind's knowledge. The lit and shadowed places within us can be warmed.

How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.