Jane Hirshfield Quotes

As a writer and as a reader, I really believe in the power of narrative to allow us ways to experience life beyond our own, ways to reflect on things that have happened to us and a chance to engage with the world in ways that transcend time and gender and all sorts of things.

My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to some music, some opera, which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.

With BSG, sci-fi is the human experience taken beyond the envelope. When I first became involved with the project, I knew that I would be able to play a human being for many years, exploring and reflecting on issues that would impact people's lives.

As an actress, I'm drawn to emotion and expressing the human condition in all its forms, and I'm fortunate to have thoughts and feelings at my fingertips.

I'm interested in pursuing roles that allow me to push against my own walls, my own constraints as a human being, and to find out where I'm capable of going. In real life, I'm not very good at feeling emotions, so I like to do it through my work.

I am so enriched because so much has happened in my life. The way I can express myself is because of the life I have led. It's only when you experience life can you emote it.

I'm a complete human being. I'm very emotional and loving. I feel, I hurt, I give, I take, and also I think. I analyze. I'm a sociologist, anthropologist.

I want to explore more sides of humanity and myself. That's what acting is about.

I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.

I am not fundamentally a musician, I am fundamentally a human being.

Anything that's different from your own realm of experience as a human being, whether it's driving a car or a boat, or using guns, anything that separates you from yourself and leads you more towards this character's existence is a big help.

You can only paint through your experience and sub-consciousness.

The kinds of stories I want to be a part of telling are about delving into what it is to be a human being.

Rather than numbing or drowning out the difficult-to-describe but urgently sensed feelings that are part of being human, poetry invites us to tease them out, to draw them into language that is rooted in intricate thought and strange impulse.

Whether it's a song or a television show, or a book or poem, art is the thing that cracks me open and encourages me to go on a deeper journey to find my own compassion and empathy and humanity.

The purpose of art is to accumulate the human within the human being.

We seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves . . . We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own . . . We demand windows.

This business of really knowing people, deep down, including your own self, it is not something you can learn in school or from a book. It takes your whole being to do it—your eyes and your ears, your brain and your heart. Maybe your heart most of all. —Bobby Goodspeed

Acting is about communicating what it is like to be human: the pain, the laughs, the misery, the joy. I suppose I am searching to have it all.

The more one does and sees and feels, the more one is able to do, and the more genuine may be one's appreciation of fundamental things like home, and love, and understanding companionship.

For me, writing is an experience. It's an exercise in which I want to discover myself by taking my characters to the edges of human experience, to the edges of themselves and then, asking certain questions - about love, what does it mean to love? What's beauty? What is true beauty? What does it mean to be insane - crazy?

Acting makes you look at life and try to understand it in a beautiful way.

Science provides an understanding of a universal experience. Arts provide a universal understanding of a personal experience.

This is going to sound pretentious and esoteric, but I truly mean it from the bottom of my heart. Acting has always been a spiritual journey for me. The very first project I ever acted on paralleled my experience so perfectly even before I was aware of it.

People are people, and they want to know about their own experiences.