“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 Copy Share Image
“There was no energy of a narrative in my family, not even the fervour of an elegy.” — Anne Michaels Copy Share Image
The spirit in the body is like wine in a glass; when it spills, it seeps into air and earth and light….It’s a mistake to think it’s the small things we control and not the large, it’s the other way around! We can’t stop the small accident, the tiny detail that conspires into fate: the extra moment you run back… — Anne Michaels Copy Share
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… — Anne Michaels Copy Share Image
I wanted a line in a poem to be the hollow ney of the dervish orchestra whose plaintive wail is a call to God.… — Anne Michaels Copy Share Image
Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil. — Anne Michaels Copy Share Image
“I saved myself without thinking. I grasped the two syllables closest to me, and replaced my heartbeat with your name.” — Anne Michaels Copy Share Image
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… — Anne Michaels Copy Share
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… — Anne Michaels Copy Share Image
I really believe we read differently when we know even the most banal facts of an author's life. — Anne Michaels Copy Share Image
To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love. — Anne Michaels Copy Share Image
Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good. — Anne Michaels Copy Share Image
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… — Anne Michaels Copy Share Image
