Anne Michaels Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 90 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Anne Michaels.
Famous Quotes By Anne Michaels
And she knew for the first time that someone can wire your skin in a single evening, and that love arrives not by accumulating to a moment, like a drop of water focused on the tip of a branch - it is not the moment of bringing your whole life to another - but rather, it is everything you leave behind. At that moment.
Even that night, the night he touched one inch of her in the dark, how simply Avery seemed to accept the facts - that they were on the edge of lifelong happiness and, therefore, inescapable sorrow. It was as if, long ago, a part of him had broken off inside, and now finally, he recognised the dangerous fragment that had been floating in his system, causing him intermittent pain over the years. As if he could now say of that ache: Ah. It was you. — Anne Michaels
I can't save a boy from a burning building. Instead he must save me from the attempt; he must jump to earth. — Anne Michaels
In Michaela's favourite restaurant, I lift my glass and cutlery spills onto the expensive tiled floor. The sound crashes high as the skylight. Looking at me, Michaela pushes her own silverware over the edge. I fell in love amid the clattering of spoons ... — Anne Michaels
Like the moon, I want to touch places
just by looking. To tell
new things at three in the morning, when we're
awake with rain or any sadness, or slendering through
reeds of sleep, surfacing to skin. — Anne Michaels
There was currant toast squishy with butter, caramel-marshmallow squares, strawberry boats oozing custard, chocolate exclairs that exploded with cream when the cats bit into them with their little white teeth and-- a special treat for Pleasant-- a pie made from thick slices of Bramley apple, with just the right amount of tangy in the tangy-sweet. — Anne Michaels
There should be a democracy of voices in literature. There are people who live with a kind of striving and with a certain kind of tenderness - it's not an unusual thing - and maybe that's not written about enough. — Anne Michaels
[And while people ran about proclaiming such things,] I could only think that everything exists because of loss. From the bricks of our buildings, from cement to human cells, everything exists because of chemical transformation, and every chemical transformation is accompanied by loss. And when I look up at the night sky I think: The astronomers have given every star a number. — Anne Michaels
I really believe we read differently when we know even the most banal facts of an author's life. — Anne Michaels
I'm naive enough to think that love is always good no matter how long ago, no matter the circumstances. — Anne Michaels
Avery did not know what Jean was thinking, only that there was intense thought behind those eyes filled with tears. It was not only her weeping that moved him, but this intensity of thought he perceived in her. Already he knew that he did not want to tamper, to force open, to take what was not his; and that he was willing to wait for a long time for her to speak herself to him. — Anne Michaels
The desert abandons anyone who lies down. From the moment a body is covered in sand, the wind, like memory, begins to exhume it. And so the Bedouin and other desert tribes dig deeper graves for their women, a discretion.
Perhaps this is another reason for the immensity of the desert tombs, the sheer weight and mass of rock hauled and piled- ingeniously piled, yet piled all the same- at the gravesites of the kings.
In the desert we remain still and the earth moves beneath us. — Anne Michaels
The tombstones smashed in Hebrew cemeteries and plundered for Polish sidewalks; today bored citizens, staring at their feet while waiting for a bus, can still read the inscriptions. — Anne Michaels
As any parent knows, part of your mind is always engaged - wondering and worrying that everything is okay and calculating all the stuff that has to get done in the course of a day. When the children are asleep in their beds, I can go where I really need to go in my head. — Anne Michaels
I started to write things down, as a very young child, wanting to find a way to remember - to keep close, somehow - moments that made an impression on me. — Anne Michaels
I began the piling of words,
to dig myself out
to dare myself — Anne Michaels
In every childhood there is a door that closes. Only real love waits while we journey through our grief. That is the real trustworthiness between people. In all the epics, in all the stories that have lasted through many lifetimes, it is always the same truth: love must wait for wounds to heal. It is this waiting we must do for each other, not with a sense of mercy, or in judgment, but as if forgiveness were a rendezvous. How many are willing to wait for another in this way? — 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
To survive was to escape fate. But if you escape your fate, whose life do you then step into? — Anne Michaels
Miss Petitfour loved the little pictures, each in its own serrated frame and each seeming to tell it's own little story. — Anne Michaels
In a forest of stars and boughs, here is your face. In the garden, in the shipwreck, in sacred stones, in figs and roses. Through long nights of walking, what does not sing for us? — Anne Michaels
Love permeates everything, the world is saturated with it, or is emptied of it. Always this beautiful or this bereft. — Anne Michaels
The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love." from "Memoriam — Anne Michaels
Minky, the littlest cat, look as if she stepped in snow when she was a kitten and the snow never melted. She is all black except for her white paws and the spots on her head and tail where the snow didn't melt either. — Anne Michaels
When my parents were liberated, four years before I was born, they found that the ordinary world outside the camp had been eradicated. There was no more simple meal, no thing was less than extraordinary: a fork, a mattress, a clean shirt, a book. Not to mention such things that can make one weep: an orange, meat and vegetables, hot water. There was no ordinariness to return to, no refuge from the blinding potency of things, an apple screaming its sweet juice. — Anne Michaels
My love for my family has grown for years in decay-fed soil, unwashed root pulled suddenly from the ground. Bulbous as a beet, a huge eye under a lid of earth. Scoop out the eye, blind the earth. — Anne Michaels
Long after you've forgotten someone's voice, you can still remember the sound of their happiness or their sadness. You can feel it in your body. — Anne Michaels
There's a moment when love makes you believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone's grief ... is the weight of a sleeping child. — Anne Michaels
The shawl's bottom edge the clearest blue, as if it has been dipped in the sea. The blue of a glance. — Anne Michaels
Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city. — Anne Michaels
Trees, for example, carry the memory of rainfall. In their rings we read ancient weather - storms, sunlight, and temperatures, the growing seasons of centuries. A forest shares a history, which each tree remembers even after it has been felled. — Anne Michaels
Reading a poem in translation," wrote Bialek, "is like kissing a woman through a veil"; and reading Greek poems, with a mixture of katharevousa and the demotic, is like kissing two women. Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what's between the lines, the mysterious implications. — Anne Michaels
If the truth is not in the face, then where is it? In the hands! In the hands. — Anne Michaels
When you put a tremendous amount of love into your work, as in any relationship, you can't know - you can only hope - that what you're offering will in some way be received. You shape your love to artistic demands, to the rigors of your genre. But still, it's a labor of love, and it's the nature of love that you must give it freely. — 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
That they were torn from mistakes they had no chance to fix; everything unfinished. All the sins of love without detail, detail without love. The regret of having spoken, of having run out of time to speak. Of hoarding oneself. Of turning one's back too often in favour of sleep. I tried to imagine their physical needs, the indignity of human needs grown so extreme they equal your longing for wife, child, sister, parent, friend. But truthfully I couldn't even begin to imagine the trauma of their hearts, of being taken in the middle of their lives. Those with young children. Or those newly in love, wrenched from that state of grace. Or those who had lived invisibly, who were never know. — Anne Michaels
I want you to promise
we'll see each other again,
you'll send a letter.
Promise we'll be lost together
in our forest, pale birches of our legs.
I hear your voice now - I know,
everyone knows promises come from fear.
People don't live past each other,
you're always here with me. Sometimes
I pretend you're in the other room
until it rains ... and then
this is the letter I always write ... — Anne Michaels
There are so many things, he said quietly, that we can't see but that we believe in, so many places that seem to possess an unaccountable feeling, a presence, an absence. Sometimes it takes time to learn this, like a child who suddenly realizes for the first time that the ball he threw over the fence has not disappeared. — Anne Michaels
The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst. — 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
the rain that held the light
that fell, the rain that fell,
the light that held — 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
In the Golleschau quarry, stone-carriers were forced to haul huge blocks of limestone endlessly, from one mound to another and back again. During the torture, they carried their lives in their hands. The insane task was not futile only in the sense that faith is not futile.
A camp inmate looked up at the stars and suddenly remembered that they'd once seemed beautiful to him. This memory of beauty was accompanied by a bizarre stab of gratitude. When I first read this I couldn't imagine it. But later I felt I understood. Sometimes the body experiences a revelation because it has abandoned every other possibility. — Anne Michaels
Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good. — 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
I have a profound resistance to the idea that a reader could say, 'Oh, well, that's her story.' We should all be interested, no matter where we come from, or who our parents are. It's not my province; it's ours. These questions concern us all. — Anne Michaels
To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love. — 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
History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments. — 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
The truth doesn't care what we think of it. — Anne Michaels
the dead lose every sense except hearing. — Anne Michaels
Misty is the color of rain on a window. — Anne Michaels
I could easily imagine carrying a favoured item to the ends of the earth, if only to help believe I'd see its beloved owner again. — Anne Michaels
When a man dies, his secrets bond like crystals, like frost on a window. His last breath obscures the glass. — 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
Not long after our final lesson, on one of our Sundays at the lake, my father and I were walking along the shore when he noticed a small rock shaped like a bird. When he picked it up, I saw the quick gleam of satisfaction in his face and felt in an instant that I had less power to please him than a stone. — Anne Michaels
Sometimes things work out differently than you expect, and sometimes that's when the best things happen. — Anne Michaels
It's a fantastic privilege to spend three or four hundred pages with a reader. You have time to go into certain questions that are painful or difficult or complicated. That's one thing that appeals to me very much about the novel form. — Anne Michaels
Sometimes, all you must do is reach out your hand for something wonderful to happen. — Anne Michaels
Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them! — Anne Michaels
Sometimes I can't look you in the eye; you're like a building that's burned out inside, with the outer wall still standing. — Anne Michaels
Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil. — Anne Michaels
History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers. History is the Totenbuch, The Book of the Dead, kept by the administrators of the camps. Memory is the Memorbucher, the names of those to be mourned, read aloud in the synagogue. — Anne Michaels
Everything in this world is what has been left behind. — Anne Michaels
Certain things can't be approximated, so I'm always interested in getting in another way, one which makes the reader bend in closer to the scene even if that scene, especially if that scene, is painful ... Brutal language isn't necessarily the most truthful way of describing a brutal moment. — Anne Michaels
The mainland can stretch until it breaks at the weakest points, and those weaknesses are called faults. Each island represented a victory and a defeat: it had either pulled itself free or pulled too hard and found itself alone. Later, as these islands grew older, they turned their misfortune into virtue, learned to accept their cragginess, their misshapen coasts, ragged where they'd been torn. They acquired grace. — Anne Michaels
Truth grows gradually in us, like a musician who plays a piece again and again until suddenly he hears it for the first time — 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
Time is a blind guide. — Anne Michaels
Sitting alone with Jean, Avery felt for the first time that he was part of the world, engaged in the same simple happiness that was known to so many and was so miraculous. He wanted to know everything; he did not mean this carelessly. He wanted to know the child and the schoolgirl, what she'd believed in and what she'd loved, what she'd worn and what she'd read
no detail was too small or insignificant
so that when at last he touched her, his hands would have this intelligence. — Anne Michaels
Any given moment - no matter how casual, how ordinary - is poised, full of gaping life. — Anne Michaels
Perhaps we painted on our own skin, with ochre and charcoal, long before we painted on stone. — Anne Michaels
There was no energy of a narrative in my family, not even the fervour of an elegy. — Anne Michaels
It's not a person's depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent. — Anne Michaels
Write to save yourself,' Athos said, 'and someday you'll write because you've been saved. — Anne Michaels
The food shortages required inventiveness ... Daphne showed me the difference it made if she placed plums in a green bowl or in a yellow bowl before she set them on the table. — Anne Michaels
I think there are all kinds of aspects to reality, to domestic reality, and why don't we just talk about them all? — Anne Michaels
The winter street is a salt cave. The snow has stopped falling and it's very cold. The cold is spectacular, penetrating. The street has been silenced, a theatre of whiteness, drifts like frozen waves. Crystals glisten under the streetlights. — Anne Michaels
Our bodies surround what has always been there — Anne Michaels
I'm not being naive; I realise there's no such thing as a pure reading. But I'd rather keep myself as far out of it as I can. — Anne Michaels
I see that I must give what I most need. — Anne Michaels
I've said this before - and I mean it strongly - an abstract concept or a moral issue has to be connected to feeling. If we don't believe it somehow viscerally, we don't really take it in. — 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
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
When Miss Petitfour made a fancy salad, Minky watched the way the lettuce leaves bent under the slight weight of the Parmesan; when Miss Petitfour had cheese toast for tea, Minky noticed how the cheddar melted into every little crevice and crater of the toast. She licked her whiskers greedily when Miss Petitfour lowered her hand to feed her snippets and smidgens, pinches and wedges, slices and crumbs. Minky loved all cheese--Swiss cheese, Edam cheese, Gruyere and Roquefort, Brie cheese and blue cheese, mozzarella and Parmesan, hard cheese, crumbly cheese, creamy cheese, lumpy cheese. Minky even had a cheese calendar that she kept with, which Miss Petitfour had given to her for Christmas. Each month there was a big picture of a different kind of cheese in a mouthwatering pose: blue cheese cavorting with pears, cheddar laughing with apples, Gruyere lounging with grapes, Edam joking with parsley. — Anne Michaels
Fiction allows you to embody certain ideas and give them an emotional reality. The characters allow you to get close viscerally to an idea. — Anne Michaels