Anne Michaels Quotes

23 Sourced Quotes

Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.

Anne Michaels
To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love.

Anne Michaels
I wanted a line in a poem to be the hollow ney of the dervish orchestra whose plaintive wail is a call to God. But all I achieved was awkward shrieking. Not even the pure shriek of a reed in the rain.

Anne Michaels
When a man dies, his secrets bond like crystals, like frost on a window. His last breath obscures the glass.

Anne Michaels
Now we're like planets, holding to each other from a great distance. [...] Now we're hundreds of miles apart, our short arms keep us lonely, no one hears what's in my head. [...] It's March, even the birds don't know what to do with themselves.

Anne Michaels
When we say we're looking for a spiritual adviser, we're really looking for someone to tell us what to do with our bodies. Decisions of the flesh. We forget to learn from pleasure as well as pain.

Anne Michaels
Even as a child, even as my blood-past was drained from me, I understood that if I were strong enough to accept it, I was being offered a second history.

Anne Michaels
Love makes you see a place differently, just as you hold differently an object that belongs to someone you love. If you know one landscape well, you will look at all other landscapes differently. And if you learn to love one place, sometimes you can also learn to love another.

Anne Michaels
Important lessons: look carefully; record what you see. Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful.

Anne Michaels
Any given moment - no matter how casual, how ordinary - is poised, full of gaping life.

Anne Michaels
The shadow-past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst. A biography of longing. It steers us like magnetism, a spirit torque. This is how one becomes undone by a smell, a word, a place, the photo of a mountain of shoes. By love that closes its mouth before calling a name.

Anne Michaels
If love wants you; if you've been melted down to stars, you will love with lungs and gills; with feathers and scales; with warm blood and cold.

Anne Michaels
No one is born just once. If you're lucky, you'll emerge again in someone's arms; or unlucky, wake when the long tail of terror brushes the inside of your skull.

Anne Michaels
Once I was lost in a forest. I was so afraid. My blood pounded in my chest and I knew my heart's strength would soon be exhausted. I saved myself without thinking. I grasped the two syllables closest to me, and replaced my heartbeat with your name.

Anne Michaels
Like other ghosts, she whispers; not for me to join her, but so that, when I'm close enough, she can push me back into the world.

Anne Michaels
History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.

Anne Michaels
I'm naive enough to think that love is always good no matter how long ago, no matter the circumstances.

Anne Michaels
The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst.

Anne Michaels
When you are alone - at sea, in the polar dark - an absence can keep you alive. The one you love maintains your mind. But when she's merely across the city, this is an absence that eats you to the bone.

Anne Michaels
The best teacher lodges an intent not in the mind but in the heart.

Anne Michaels
But sometimes the world disrobes, slips its dress off a shoulder, stops time for a beat. If we look up at that moment, it's not due to any ability of ours to pierce the darkness, it's the world's brief bestowal. The catastrophe of grace.

Anne Michaels
Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.

Anne Michaels
The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love. from Memoriam

Anne Michaels