Anne Michaels Quotes

Quotes about:

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

  Anne Michaels

  Inspirational, Book, Healing

  Anne Michaels (2010). “Fugitive Pieces”, p.156, Emblem Editions

  48 Copy quote

• 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

  Sadness, Voice, Long

  Anne Michaels (2009). “The Winter Vault”, p.53, Bloomsbury Publishing

  26 Copy quote

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

  Anne Michaels

  Beautiful, Important, Looks

  Anne Michaels (2010). “Fugitive Pieces”, p.44, Emblem Editions

  15 Copy quote

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

  Anne Michaels

  Teacher, Retirement, Teaching

  Anne Michaels (2010). “Fugitive Pieces”, p.121, Emblem Editions

  10 Copy quote

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

  Anne Michaels

  Thinking, Care

  Anne Michaels (2010). “Fugitive Pieces”, p.107, Emblem Editions

  20 Copy quote

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

  Anne Michaels

  Hiding, Psychological, Intimate

  Anne Michaels (2010). “Fugitive Pieces”, p.20, Emblem Editions

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Darkness, Grace, World

  Anne Michaels (2010). “Fugitive Pieces”, p.175, Emblem Editions

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Love, Skulls, Long

  Anne Michaels (2009). “Fugitive Pieces”, p.10, A&C Black

  18 Copy quote

• When you put a tremendous amount of love into your work, as in any relationship, you can't know - you can only hope - that what you're offering will in some way be received. You shape your love to artistic demands, to the rigors of your genre. But still, it's a labor of love, and it's the nature of love that you must give it freely.

  Anne Michaels

  Offering, Giving, Demand

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  Love, Looks, Landscape

  Anne Michaels (2010). “Fugitive Pieces”, p.82, Emblem Editions

  18 Copy quote

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

  Anne Michaels

  Depth, Ascent, Path

  Anne Michaels (2010). “Fugitive Pieces”, p.259, Emblem Editions

  9 Copy quote

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

  Anne Michaels

  Silence, Stones, Helping

  Anne Michaels (2010). “Fugitive Pieces”, p.77, Emblem Editions

  12 Copy quote

• 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 like magnetism, a spirit torque. This is how one becomes undone by a smell, a word, a place, the photo of a mountain of shoes. By love that closes its mouth before calling a name.

  Anne Michaels

  Rain, Past, Names

  Anne Michaels (2009). “Fugitive Pieces”, p.15, A&C Black

  10 Copy quote

• 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 free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both, like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what's between the lines, the mysterious implications.

  Anne Michaels

  Philosophy, Moving, Sacrifice

  Anne Michaels (2010). “Fugitive Pieces”, p.109, Emblem Editions

  13 Copy quote

• 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

  Stars, Blood, Want

  Anne Michaels (2009). “Skin Divers”, p.20, McClelland & Stewart

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  Children, Grief, Believe

  6 Copy quote

• I see that I must give what I most need.

  Anne Michaels

  Giving, Needs

  Anne Michaels (2010). “Fugitive Pieces”, p.292, Emblem Editions

  4 Copy quote

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

  Anne Michaels

  Ordinary, Matter, Moments

  Anne Michaels (2010). “Fugitive Pieces”, p.19, Emblem Editions

  6 Copy quote

• Trees for example, carry the memory of rainfal. 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

  Memories, Weather, Tree

  Anne Michaels (2009). “Fugitive Pieces”, p.123, A&C Black

  4 Copy quote

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

  Anne Michaels

  Love Is, Thinking, Long Ago

  Anne Michaels (2010). “Fugitive Pieces”, p.116, Emblem Editions

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Heart, Thinking, Blood

  Anne Michaels (2009). “Fugitive Pieces”, p.115, A&C Black

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Dark, Sea, Cities

  Anne Michaels (2009). “Fugitive Pieces”, p.55, A&C Black

  8 Copy quote

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

  Anne Michaels

  Memories, Two, Space

  Anne Michaels (2009). “Fugitive Pieces”, p.65, A&C Black

  4 Copy quote

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

  Anne Michaels

  Reading, Kissing, Veils

  7 Copy quote

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

  Anne Michaels

  Mouths, Starving

  7 Copy quote

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