Anne Michaels quotes

Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city. (Anne Michaels)
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
Important lessons: look carefully; record what you see. Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful.
Anne Michaels
Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them!
Anne Michaels
I see that I must give what I most need.
Anne Michaels
I'm naive enough to think that love is always good no matter how long ago, no matter the circumstances.
Anne Michaels
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
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
Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
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 the world.
Anne Michaels
I really believe we read differently when we know even the most banal facts of an author's life. (Anne Michaels)
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
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
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
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
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
Any given moment-no matter how casual, how ordinary-is poised, full of gaping life.
Anne Michaels
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
... 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
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