The Beauty Quotes

“In a room with many windows
some thoughts slide past uncatchable, ghostly.”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Beauty

“There are worlds / in which nothing is adjective, everything noun.”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Beauty

“The heart’s reasons
seen clearly,
even the hardest
will carry
its whip-marks and sadness
and must be forgiven.

As the drought-starved
eland forgives
the drought-starved lion
who finally takes her,
enters willingly then
the life she cannot refuse,
and is lion, is fed,
and does not remember the other.

So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.

The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Beauty

“Hunger that comes and goes turns time into memory.”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Beauty

“Desire is the moment before the race is run.”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Beauty

“When the body dies, where will they go, those migrant birds and prayer calls, as heat from sheets when taken from a dryer? With voices of the ones I loved, great loves and small loves, train wheels, crickets, clock-ticks, thunder – where will they, when in fragrant, tumbled heat they also leave?”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Beauty

“I cast my hook, my vote against it,
I decide to make peace.

I declare this intention but nothing answers.
And so I put peace in a warm place, towel-covered, to proof,
then into an oven. I wait.
Peace is patient and undemanding, it surpasseth.”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Beauty

“a bowl held in both hands cannot be filled by its holder”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Beauty: Poems

“However many holes are in you,
always there’s room for another.
However much you carry,
you can hold more.

“My Corkboard”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Beauty

“So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Beauty

“THE CONVERSATIONS I REMEMBER MOST”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Beauty: Poems

“SOUVENIR I would like to take something with me but even one chair is too awkward too heavy peeling paint falls off in a suitcase hinge sounds betray a theft cheeses won’t keep the clothespin without its surroundings would be mediocre the big thunder rolled elsewhere the umbrella is for sale but in a desert what you want is a soaking the do not disturb sign is tattered I have many times taken some café’s small packets of sugar so that in Turkey I might sweeten my coffee with China, and in Italy remember a Lithuanian pastry but where is the coffee hands left and right useless knees clattery heart finally calm as some hero at the end of a movie squinting silently into the sun you can’t hold an umbrella there anyhow and what would he hang from the clothespin”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Beauty: Poems