Anne Michaels Quotes

Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.

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.

The truth doesn't care what we think of it.

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.

Important lessons: look carefully; record what you see. Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful.

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.

Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them!

I'm naive enough to think that love is always good no matter how long ago, no matter the circumstances.

It is not a person’s depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent.

The best teacher lodges an intent not in the mind but in the heart.

The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.” from “Memoriam

The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst.

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

Any given moment - no matter how casual, how ordinary - is poised, full of gaping life.

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

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

...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.

I see that I must give what I most need.

History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.

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.

History is the gradual instant

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.

When a man dies, his secrets bond like crystals, like frost on a window. His last breath obscures the glass.

Truth grows gradually in us, like a musician who plays a piece again and again until suddenly he hears it for the first time

Misty is the color of rain on a window.

It's not a person's depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent.

To survive was to escape fate. But if you escape your fate, whose life do you then step into?

All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child.

Any given moment—no matter how casual, how ordinary—is poised, full of gaping life.