E.d. Hirsch Quotes & Sayings

There was never anything between us and there never will be. Don't waste any more time worrying about feelings that neither of us ever had. - Jake — Jeff Hirsch

Babies used to make me nervous, but these squirmy things are awesome once you've read the manual. — David Z. Hirsch

There's no such religious force in the West as powerful as consumerism. — Alan Hirsch

He tried to escape he could not
Cut the binding cord of human love [ ... ]
Sweet venom
His arrivals were swift
And his departures sudden
I couldn't understand how
He lifted the shower door
Right off its hinges [ ... ]
Love you he coughed and kissed me
See you next week he was out
The door like a thousand other times [ ... ]
Most reckless of
reckless angels — Edward Hirsch

We have ignored cultural literacy in thinking about education We ignore the air we breathe until it is thin or foul. Cultural literacy is the oxygen of social intercourse. — E.D. Hirsch Jr.

When we reduce Christianity to a negative system where fasting becomes more sacred than feasting, law wins out over grace, and correct theology becomes more important than divine encounter, we in effect become the modern-day Pharisees - whose ministry Jesus was set against. — Debra Hirsch

And Mandelstam says a poet - you go down to the shore and you see an unlikely looking from a bottle from the past, you open it. Mandelstam says, "It's okay to do so. I'm not reading someone else's mail. It was addressed to whoever found it. I found it, therefore it's addressed to me." — Edward Hirsch

Depression is a feeling without a cause. Mourning has a cause. — Edward Hirsch

Our culture has become increasingly intolerant of that acute sorrow, that intense mental anguish and deep remorse which may be defined as grief. We want to medicate such sorrow away. — Edward Hirsch

Now, I do say, "It's possible. You might be the first. I'm not saying it's impossible, but the odds are very much against you." All great poets have been great readers and the way to learn your craft in poetry is by reading other poetry and by letting it guide you. — Edward Hirsch

Evangelism cant be our focus! We must not stop sharing the good news, but here's the deal, here's the wonderful thing, it gets done along the way as you do discipleship. Great commission is just about going to disciple the nations and you know what happens ... as you disciple them evangelism takes place, because it's done in the context of discipleship.
Here's the issue: We have to reframe evangelism within the context of discipleship — Alan Hirsch

I have the idea that lyric poetry is a poetry that's driven by a sense of the presence of death. That there's something unbearable about the fact that we're going to die and that we can't stand it and I think you find that out in childhood and you don't really - at least I found it out in childhood and I found it hard to get over. — Edward Hirsch

Works of art imitate and provoke other works of art, the process is the source of art itself. — Edward Hirsch

Some people could say, "I'd like something that's super dramatic and miserable and made me cry and made me sad forever" but that's not my taste. — Alex Hirsch

The idea of how to read a poem is based on the idea that poetry needs you as a reader. That the experience of poetry, the meaning in poetry, is a kind of circuit that takes place between a poet, a poem and a reader, and that meaning doesn't exist or inhere in poems alone. — Edward Hirsch

I think I've always been half out of my shell and half in. Sometimes I can be extremely wild and sometimes I can be extremely shy. It just depends on the day. — Emile Hirsch

Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends. — Edward Hirsch

I try to be a man of mystery. I try to keep the various projects I'm up to as close to the vest as possible until it's time to reveal them. — Alex Hirsch

Schemata are our necessary instruments for making the surfaces of what we read connect significantly with the background knowledge that is wittheld from immediate conciousness by the limits of short-term memory. — E.D. Hirsch Jr.

Differences in reading ability between five-year olds and eight-year olds are caused primarily by the older children's possessing more knowledge, not by the differences in their memory capacities, reasoning abilities, or control of eye movements. — E.D. Hirsch Jr.

Our society cannot afford a two-tiered system in which the affluent have access to superior education, while everyone else is subjected to a dull and incoherent classroom experience. Academic excellence, educational equity, and fairness demand a strong foundation of knowledge for all learners. — E.D. Hirsch Jr.

The achievement of high universal literacy is the key to all other fundamental improvements in American education. — E.D. Hirsch Jr.

The distance between one historical period and another is a very small step in comparison to the huge metaphysical gap we must leap to understand the perspective of another person in any time or place. — E.D. Hirsch Jr.

I'm sure that if Plato hadn't been against music with a strong sexual beat, Bloom would have kept quiet about rock-and-roll. — E.D. Hirsch Jr.

There's been no poet, no great poet in the history of poetry who hasn't also been a great reader of poetry. This is sometimes distressing to my students when I tell them this. — Edward Hirsch

The more the Jew is a Jew, the more universalist will his views and aspirations be, the less aloof will he be from anything that is noble and good, true and upright, in art or science, in culture or education; the more joyfully will he applaud whenever he sees truth and justice and peace and the ennoblement of man prevail and become dominant in human society. — Samson Raphael Hirsch

The mysterious thing about writing poetry is that when you're - when things are going poorly, when you're not thinking well, even making two sentences together is extremely hard and I just can't make the connections. — Edward Hirsch

And a lot of poetry is putting yourself back into the state of wonder that you have before things when you're a child. It's not only a joyous wonder, it's sometimes a grief stricken wonder. — Edward Hirsch

There are still many tribal cultures where poetry and song, there is just one word for them. There are other cultures with literacy where poetry and song are distinguished. But poetry always remembers that it has its origins in music. — Edward Hirsch

I have a lot of people in my life who are truly ridiculous characters, and they're very, very funny people, but they don't really try to be. They're not cracking jokes. — Emile Hirsch

Especially these days where everything is so polite and so proper, I think that rites of passage are good. — Emile Hirsch

A missional church is a church that must live the dialectic. It must stay in the journey. — Alan Hirsch

All too often, parents and kids struggle to find an empathetic ear when confronting bullying situation; these escalate and too often result in marginalization, on top of what may well be a daily gauntlet of harassment and abuse that is fundamentally torture. — Lee Hirsch

I was surprised recently to find a book called "Poetry in Persons" that's coming out about visit to poets to a class that Pearl London gave. — Edward Hirsch

Real leaders ask hard questions and knock people out of their comfort zones and then manage the resulting distress. — Alan Hirsch

When I got a lap dance, because I was 17, they had to put a massive pillow between me and the girl when she was grinding me. It was weird, yet pleasurable. — Emile Hirsch

People always ask me about career choices, though it rarely ever seems like any kind of choice. It's just like, I really want to do something, this is what I can do, and that's it. I'm lucky to be doing this at all. — Emile Hirsch

When I was young, I wrote everything, and I thought I would be an all around writer, that I would write everything. — Edward Hirsch

I remember when I saw 'The Matrix' when I was 13, I saw it in the theaters, and I was so blown away by it. It was one of the most memorable experiences I definitely ever had in the theater. — Emile Hirsch

The genres are widening. I don't think that there's as many limitations on the kinds of projects that actors can do as there once was. — Emile Hirsch

Writing poetry is such an intense experience that it helps to start the process in a casual or wayward frame of mind. — Edward Hirsch

I walk with Federico Garcia Lorca around the Upper West Side in Manhattan because that was a neighborhood he lived in and I imagine walking around Paris with Cesar Vallejo, a great Peruvian poet who lived in Paris. And I kind of create the walk as a kind of drama of my apprenticeship. — Edward Hirsch

It was very, very challenging being on this thing called the gimbal. It would throw you around, give you whiplash, and they'd tie you down. — Emile Hirsch

A stress on the system and I think a painful thing for many young poets who are looking to find a life in poetry that they're not going to be able to find. — Edward Hirsch