Top 73 Anne Michaels Quotes
#3. 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
#4. Everything in this world is what has been left behind.
Anne Michaels
#6. 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
#7. When a man dies, his secrets bond like crystals, like frost on a window. His last breath obscures the glass.
Anne Michaels
#8. It's not a person's depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent.
Anne Michaels
#9. 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
#10. The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst.
Anne Michaels
#11. Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.
Anne Michaels
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. Any given moment - no matter how casual, how ordinary - is poised, full of gaping life.
Anne Michaels
#16. 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
#17. Our bodies surround what has always been there
Anne Michaels
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. I began the piling of words,
to dig myself out
to dare myself
Anne Michaels
#21. To survive was to escape fate. But if you escape your fate, whose life do you then step into?
Anne Michaels
#23. 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
#24. Perhaps we painted on our own skin, with ochre and charcoal, long before we painted on stone.
Anne Michaels
#25. Sometimes things work out differently than you expect, and sometimes that's when the best things happen.
Anne Michaels
#26. Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them!
Anne Michaels
#27. Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
Anne Michaels
#28. 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
#29. 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
#31. 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
#32. History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.
Anne Michaels
#34. 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
#35. Love permeates everything, the world is saturated with it, or is emptied of it. Always this beautiful or this bereft.
Anne Michaels
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.
Anne Michaels
#39. I'm naive enough to think that love is always good no matter how long ago, no matter the circumstances.
Anne Michaels
#40. Sometimes, all you must do is reach out your hand for something wonderful to happen.
Anne Michaels
#41. 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
#42. What is a man," said Athos, "who has no landscape? Nothing but mirrors and tides.
Anne Michaels
#43. I really believe we read differently when we know even the most banal facts of an author's life.
Anne Michaels
#44. 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
#45. The shawl's bottom edge the clearest blue, as if it has been dipped in the sea. The blue of a glance.
Anne Michaels
#46. the rain that held the light
that fell, the rain that fell,
the light that held
Anne Michaels
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. There was no energy of a narrative in my family, not even the fervour of an elegy.
Anne Michaels
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. Miss Petitfour loved the little pictures, each in its own serrated frame and each seeming to tell it's own little story.
Anne Michaels
#54. If the truth is not in the face, then where is it? In the hands! In the hands.
Anne Michaels
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. Write to save yourself,' Athos said, 'and someday you'll write because you've been saved.
Anne Michaels
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. Important lessons: look carefully; record what you see. Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful.
Anne Michaels
#64. To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love.
Anne Michaels
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. Destruction doesn't create a vacuum, it simply transforms presence into absence.
Anne Michaels
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love." from "Memoriam
Anne Michaels
#73. 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
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