Ten Windows Quotes

“The desire of monks and mystics is not unlike that of artists: to perceive the extraordinary within the ordinary by changing not the world but the eyes that look… To form the intention of new awareness is already to transform and be transformed.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World

“The desire of monks and mystics is not unlike that of artists: to perceive the extraordinary within the ordinary by changing not the world but the eyes that look.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World

“To plunge one thing into the shape or nature of another is a fundamental gesture of creative insight, part of how we make for ourselves a world more expansive, deft, fertile, and startling in richness.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World

“Wherever the gaze rests, art will draw it also elsewhere, will remind that there is always more. Alice does not stop and face her own reflection in the looking-glass: she travels through it.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World

“All writers recognize this surge of striking; in its energies the objects of the world are made new, alchemized by their passage through the imaginal, musical, world-foraging and word-forging mind.

This altered vision is the secret happiness of poems, of poets. It is as if the poem encounters the world and finds in it a hidden language, a Braille unreadable except when raised by the awakened imaginative mind.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World

“The thought that something we cannot see, of unsurpassable skill and unimaginable form, exists in the back room’s locked safe—isn’t this, for any artist, for any person, an irresistible hope, beautiful and disturbing as the distant baying of Thoreau’s lost hound that tells us, not least, that the mysteries of distance are endless?”
― Jane Hirshfield, Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World

“Good art is a truing of vision, in the way a saw is trued in the saw shop, to cut more cleanly. It is also a changing of vision. Entering a good poem, a person feels, tastes, hears, thinks, and sees in altered ways. Why ask art into a life at all, if not to be transformed and enlarged by its presence and mysterious means?”
― Jane Hirshfield, Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World

“What surprises, etymology tells us, is what is “beyond grasp.” Even the mind of the author cannot seem to keep what has been found: great poems exceed their creators. They are more capacious, capricious, compassionate, original, witty, strange, avaricious for beauty and range. The writer’s life, the historical times, do not make the art. Art makes art.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World

“The experience of an enlarged intimacy is not the only reason to want art in our lives, but it is a central reason. The windows that break open the boundaries of a poem, piece of music, or painting do the same work: they awaken and give entrance to what might otherwise not be recognized, felt, or known as inseparably part of the story.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World

“To remind us of the existence of others when we have fallen into the maze of interior, subjective life is one large part of the work of literature’s windows. They keep us from stifling solipsism, by returning the personal self to connection with what is beyond it.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World

“Yeats—himself, we should note, deeply involved with the struggle for Irish independence—once said, “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” On the other side of the question, many feel that the abrasions of history upon, within, and against individual lives have been part of poetry’s domain from the start, and that whatever affects a person belongs in poems, and can be joined there to all the rest—the emotional with the intellectual; the personal with the social; the public and the private; the natural world and the humanly made; the coldness of stone and the humanly felt; the knowledge of violent injustice and the longing for lyrical transcendence.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World