Jane Hirshfield Quotes

Everybody interprets things differently with their own perception, and I want poetry to pull out of them their own feelings.

We are not imprisoned by circumstances, setbacks, mistakes or staggering defeats, we are freed by our choices.

Reality isn't a vast, fixed scheme trapping you without choice. At any moment you have the choice to break out of what is really trapping you-your automatic reactions dredged up from the past.

Consciousness is observing your thoughts and actions so that you can live from true choice in the present moment rather than being run by programming from the past.

When we believe or say we have been offended, we usually mean we feel insulted, mistreated, snubbed, or disrespected. And certainly clumsy, embarrassing, unprincipled, and mean-spirited things do occur in our interactions with other people that would allow us to take offense. However, it ultimately is impossible for another person to offend you or to offend me. Indeed, believing that another person offended us is fundamentally false. To be offended is a choice we make; it is not a condition inflicted or imposed upon us by someone or something else.

Choice is a signature of our species.

Who gets to decide what you want?

No one controls your destiny. Even at the very worst - there is always choice.

At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink. What I've chosen, what's happened unchosen, can't be unmade or redone. Poetry, though, is a door that only continues to open. Even the unchangeable past changes inside a poem. Not the facts, but the feeling, the comprehension.

It was scary. But it was so liberating. I thought, This is not predetermined - I get to choose. There are some days where I have to choose five times in a day. I had to make a choice when you called and the phone rang, whether I'm going to show up and be me, or whether I'm going to say what I think I'm supposed to say and get off the phone.

You are always free to choose what you do with your life. To make changes in your future, make new choices today.

Everything you do is based on the choices you make. It's not your parents, your past relationships, your job, the economy, the weather, an argument or your age that is to blame. You and only you are responsible for every decision and choice you make. Period.

To be is not a choice, but the way you feel about it certainly is.

The aesthetic event is something as evident, as immediate, as indefinable as love, the taste of fruit, of water. We feel poetry as we feel the closeness of a woman, or as we feel a mountain or a bay. If we feel it immediately, why dilute it with other words, which no doubt will be weaker than our feelings?

True freedom is understanding that we have a choice in who and what we allow to have power over us.

Now I do have a choice, and I'm not going to do anything I don't want to do.

You can't let anybody else tell you what your choices are. Sometimes they won't give you the right choice.

We can't choose our lives, but we can DECIDE what to do with the joys or griefs we're given.

What makes poetry? A full heart, brimful of one noble passion.

We can only choose whether we will feel and not what we will feel.

Your own life is the way it is because of you, and the choices you have made - or failed to make.

Everything you do is by choice. It may not seem so, but it is.

We cannot lead a choiceless life. Every day, every moment, every second, there is a choice. If it were not so, we would not be individuals.

A poem is the realization of love. . . .

A poem can use anything to talk about anything.