A Quote by Jane Hirshfield

How sad they are, the promises we never return to. They stay in our mouths, roughen the tongue, lead lives of their own. — © Jane Hirshfield
How sad they are, the promises we never return to. They stay in our mouths, roughen the tongue, lead lives of their own.
However good we are, however correctly we seek to lead our lives, tragedies do occur. We can blame others, look for justification, imagine how our lives would have been different without them. But none of that matters: they have happened, and that is that. From this point on, it is necessary that we review our own lives, overcome fear, and begin the process of reconstruction.
Storytelling is our oldest form of remembering the promises we have made to one another and to our various gods, and the promises given in return; it is a way of recording our human emotions and desires and taboos.
Grownups! Everyone remembers them. How strange and even sad it is that we never became what they were: beings noble, infallible, and free. We never became them. One of the things we discover as we live is that we never become anything different from what we are. We are no less ourselves at forty than we were at four, and because of this we know grownups as Grownups only once in life: during our own childhood. We never meet them in our lives again, and we will miss them always.
O sin, how you paint your face! how you flatter us poor mortals on to death! You never appear to the sinner in your true character; you make fair promises, but you never fulfil one; your tongue is smoother than oil, but the poison of asps is under your lip!
If we are just going to start living our lives based on what people have to think about us, we will lead a very sad life. So, I've never focused on people's opinions and it's doesn't really matter to me.
How very beautiful and consoling our faith is! For the little work we do here on earth it promises in return all the joys of assured happiness.
My guilty pleasure at the end of the day is an old thesaurus. I know that can lead to overwriting, but if words such as lambent, pyretic and boscy exist, how sad they should stay recondite.
It is always sad to write about prejudice, but sometimes when we see it being played out in the lives of fictional characters, we can recognize it in our own lives.
The sad part is that all we're trying to do is not feel that underlying uneasiness. The sadder part is that we proceed in such a way that the uneasiness only gets worse. The message here is that the only way to ease our pain is to experience it fully. Learn to stay. Learn to stay with uneasiness, learn to stay with the tightening, learn to stay with the itch and urge of shenpa, so that the habitual chain reaction doesn't continue to rule our lives, and the patterns that we consider unhelpful don't keep getting stronger as the days and months and years go by.
Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between. Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives. But neighbors give in return. We never put back into the tree what we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me sad.
Just like in bodybuilding, failure is also a necessary experience for growth in our own lives, for if we're never tested to our limits, how will we know how strong we really are? How will we ever grow?
Since I cannot govern my own tongue, though within my own teeth, how can I hope to govern the tongue of others?
Most of us pass our lives never once laying eyes on our own organs, the most precious and amazing things we own. Until something goes wrong, we barely give them thought. This seems strange to me. How is it that we find Christina Aguilera more interesting than the inside of our own bodies?
We need to realize that the promises that overflow our Bibles will overflow into our own lives only as we appropriate them through prayer.
In the end, like so many beautiful promises in our lives, that dinner date never came to be.
I thought a lot about how the way we perceive Jesus affects the way we live, and how expectantly we face our daily lives. If we have a huge and uncompromising view of Him, it'll lead to adventurous and exciting lives of faith.
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