Being Quote by Anne Michaels

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…

— 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…

— 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.…

— Anne Michaels

Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.

— Anne Michaels

“I saved myself without thinking. I grasped the two syllables closest to me, and replaced my heartbeat with your name.”

— 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…

— 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…

— Anne Michaels

I really believe we read differently when we know even the most banal facts of an author's life.

— Anne Michaels

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

— Anne Michaels

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

— Anne Michaels

“History is the love that enters us through death.”

— 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…

— Anne Michaels