The Asking Quotes

“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.”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Asking: New and Selected Poems

“Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace.
Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder.”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Asking: New and Selected Poems

“This first day when I could do nothing, contribute nothing beyond staying distant from my own kind, I did this.”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Asking: New and Selected Poems

“I’m inside a day measured by wrist and not wristwatch. The words size and time keep turning themselves into laughter, something you do with self and air, which turn into laughter also. Like cutting the dough of this world to bake into birds that are already flying.”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Asking: New and Selected Poems

“The law of cats is simple: one arrangement becomes another.”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Asking: New and Selected Poems