Jane Hirshfield Quotes

I just think that the only way we come to ourselves is through each other.

I feel we are all islands - in a common sea.

The power of a book lies in its power to turn a solitary act into a shared vision. As long as we have books, we are not alone.

We have all known the long loneliness, and we have found that the answer is community.

Anything that makes you feel the most alone also has the greatest power to connect you.

People are always the start for me... animals, when I can get into their heads, gods, supernatural beings, immortals, the dead... these are all people to me.

One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.

That's what I love about acting and love and drama and art: that humanness we all share.

I think the most important quality for a writer to have is empathy.

As actors and directors, I feel like our job, more so than anything else, is to shine a light on a subject and to let people know that they're not alone.

The literary world is filled with good and generous people. But then that's what writing is all about - empathy.

When a poet writes a poem, meaning arises - because the poet is not alone; he has created something. When a dancer dances, meaning arises. When a mother gives birth to a child, meaning arises. Left alone, cut off from everything else, isolated like an island, you are meaningless. Joined together you are meaningful. The bigger the whole, the bigger is the meaning.

If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.

My dream is that people will find a way back home, into their bodies, to connect with the earth, to connect with each other, to connect with the poor, to connect with the broken, to connect with the needy, to connect with people calling out all around us, to connect with the beauty, poetry, the wildness.

We are all in this together, by ourselves.

We can learn the art of fierce compassion - redefining strength, deconstructing isolation and renewing a sense of community, practicing letting go of rigid us-vs.-them thinking - while cultivating power and clarity in response to difficult situations.

As we work to reweave the strands of connection, we can be supported by the wisdom and lovingkindness of others.

I believe that dialogue is the key to breaking through our tendency to separate and isolate. Dialogue changes isolation and loneliness into connection and interdependence. This, I believe, is the essence of Buddhism.

There is something in human beings that loves stories.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

I had begun to write novels because of a fierce, self-serving impulse in my own heart. I had not considered the potential in a book for felt communion, the bright largesse of intimately participating in the lives of other people.

I would advise you to write, my dear friend, because with your active nature, solitude is simply intolerable to you, and after some time your solitude would become perhaps attractive if you were to people it with creatures of your own fancy.

It's great fun if you get a good piece of writing and you can pretend to be someone else, tell a story that needs to be told, make some kind of connection. I've always fancied myself as a leading man, but I really doubt whether anyone else sees me that way.

I'm very often still very much alive for that other being and that other world long after the film is finished.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.