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...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

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Anne Michaels
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: April 15
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
City of Toronto
Body
Pleasure
Wells
Looking
Well
Forget
Really
Spiritual
Adviser
Learn
Bodies
Pain
Flesh
Tell
Decisions
Someone
Decision

More quotes by Anne Michaels

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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
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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, no one hears what's in my head. [...] It's March, even the birds don't know what to do with themselves.
Anne Michaels
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It is not a person’s depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent.
Anne Michaels
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Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
Anne Michaels
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Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.
Anne Michaels
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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
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Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them!
Anne Michaels
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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
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I see that I must give what I most need.
Anne Michaels
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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
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The best teacher lodges an intent not in the mind but in the heart.
Anne Michaels
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When a man dies, his secrets bond like crystals, like frost on a window. His last breath obscures the glass.
Anne Michaels
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The truth doesn't care what we think of it.
Anne Michaels
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Important lessons: look carefully record what you see. Find a way to make beauty necessary find a way to make necessity beautiful.
Anne Michaels
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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
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The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.” from “Memoriam
Anne Michaels
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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
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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
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History and memory share events that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.
Anne Michaels
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The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst.
Anne Michaels