Jane Hirshfield Quotes

Nature is a catchment of sorrows.

A person is full of sorrow the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.

Grief is forever. It doesn't go away; it becomes part of you, step for step, breath for breath.

No one can keep his griefs in their prime; they use themselves up.

To become a man was something, but to become a man of sorrows was far more; to bleed, and die, and suffer.

Writers write about what obsesses them. You draw those cards. I lost my mother when I was 14. My daughter died at the age of 6. I lost my faith as a Catholic. When I'm writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is.

There are some pains that run too deep for anything to absolve them. The best we can do is pick up the pieces and hope for the strength we need to keep going.

The burden of this world is too great for one man to bear, and the world’s sorrow too heavy for one heart to suffer.

There's a fine edge to new grief, it severs nerves, disconnects reality--there's mercy in a sharp blade. Only with time, as the edge wears, does the real ache begin.

Each time we love,We turn a nearer and a broader markTo that keen archer, Sorrow, and he strikes.

Sorrow is a fruit. God does not make it grow on limbs too weak to bear it.

Remember, the burden of sorrow is doubled when it is borne alone.

Everybody has their burdens, their grief that they carry with them.

I lost my husband, and it's a horrific thing to live through.

Short time seems long in sorrow's sharp sustaining.

There was a point that I stopped crying. It's not just because I didn't feel pain anymore, not because I didn't feel sorrow. It was just to keep going. I mean, it just was to survive, to live.

And yet, I found I could survive. I was alert, I felt the pain - the aching loss that radiated out from my chest, sending wracking waves of hurt through my limbs and head - but it was manageable. I could live through it. I didn't feel like the pain had weakened over time, rather that I'd grown strong enough to bear it.

The first pressure of sorrow crushes out from our hearts the best wine; afterwards the constant weight of it brings forth bitterness, the taste and stain from the lees of the vat.

What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.

Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the one you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.

A lean sorrow is hardest to bear.

I know what it's like to see one's mother go through the agony of death and be unable to help; there is no consolation. We all have to bear such heavy burdens, for they are unalterably linked to life.

I cried a river of tears but he was too heavy to float on them. So I dragged him with me these years across an ocean.

Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone.

Heartache, Daphne eventually learned, never really went away; it just dulled. The sharp, stabbing pain that one felt with each breath eventually gave way to a blunter, lower ache—the kind that one could almost—but never quite—ignore.