Anne Michaels Quotes

37 quotes in 698 categories

• The best teacher lodges an intent not in the mind but in the heart.
• 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…
• Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.
• 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…
• The truth doesn't care what we think of it.
• History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.
• History is the gradual instant
• Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You can choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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,…
• When a man dies, his secrets bond like crystals, like frost on a window. His last breath obscures the glass.
• 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…
• ...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…
• I see that I must give what I most need.
• 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…
• Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.
• 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,…
• Trees for example, carry the memory of rainfal. In their rings we read ancient weather - storms, sunlight and temperatures, the growing seasons of centuries.…
• Any given moment - no matter how casual, how ordinary - is poised, full of gaping life.

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