Jane Hirshfield Quotes

I have a thing for doors. I always think of them as a threshold to something new.

You just keep shining a light and hoping people will start to pay attention.

Dreams rise like the sun and set like the sun: One minute, it is high and bright; the next minute, you might lose it.

There's the know. And there's the unknown. And what separates the two is the door, and that's what i wanta be. Ahh wanna be th' dooooooooorrr...

I recognized that the kiss was a door I had walked through.

You know what they say, when one door closes, another Belvedere opens.

I did not want to move. For I had the feeling that this was a place, once seen, that could not be seen again. If I left and then came back, it would not be the same; no matter how many times I might return to this particular spot the place and feeling would never be the same, something would be lost or something would be added, and there never would exist again, through all eternity, all the integrated factors that made it what it was in this magic moment.

The fading light is us, and we are, for a moment so brief (...) beautiful.

opened the door a crack wide enough for the entire world to pass through .

By the time I recognize this moment, this moment will be gone. . . But I will bend the light, pretend that it somehow lingered on

We all watched Al open the door. Turning, he waved to us, then passed the threshold. The door shut behind him. I waited for something to happen. Nothing did. “This isn’t good,” Quen said. I choked back my burst of laughter, knowing it would come out sounding hysterical.

A sudden light transfigures a trivial thing, a weather-vane, a windmill, a winnowing flail, the dust in the barn door; a moment - and the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect; but it leaves a relish behind it, a longing that the accident may happen again.

She had only to open a door, nothing but a door between the words,just large enough for her and Farid to pass through.

The younger generation will come knocking at my door.

Isn't there a curious elegance in how one moment passes into another?

Sometimes you just need to go through a door.

Change is a measure of time and, in the autumn, time seems speeded up. What was is not and never again will be; what is is change.

And from the midst of cheerless gloom I passed to bright unclouded day.

Life is a stream On which we strew Petal by petal the flower of our heart; The end lost in dream, They float past our view, We only watch their glad, early start. Freighted with hope, Crimsoned with joy, We scatter the leaves of our opening rose; Their widening scope, Their distant employ, We never shall know. And the stream as it flows Sweeps them away, Each one is gone Ever beyond into infinite ways. We alone stay While years hurry on, The flower fared forth, though its fragrance still stays.

They hammered on the outer gate and called, but there was at first no answer; and then to their surprise someone blew a horn, and the lights in the windows went out. A voice shouted in the dark: 'Who's that? Be off! You can't come in. Can't you read the notice: No admittance between sundown and sunrise?' 'Of course we can't read the notice in the dark,' Sam shouted back. 'And if hobbits of the Shire are to be kept out in the wet on a night like this, I'll tear down your notice when I find it.

Or like the snow falls in the river, A moment white-then melts for ever . . .

Even a single lamp dispels the deepest darkness.