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

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Anne Michaels
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: April 15
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
City of Toronto
Love
Makes
Whose
Contemplated
Like
Moments
Loss
Firsts
Sleep
Fugitive
First
Forever
Sleeping
Children
Child
Recognize
Even
Anyone
Carry
Believe
Moment
Grief
Time
Death
Weight

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
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When a man dies, his secrets bond like crystals, like frost on a window. His last breath obscures the glass.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love.
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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.
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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
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I'm naive enough to think that love is always good no matter how long ago, no matter the circumstances.
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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.
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It is not a person’s depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent.
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Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.
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Any given moment - no matter how casual, how ordinary - is poised, full of gaping life.
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.
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The truth doesn't care what we think of it.
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The best teacher lodges an intent not in the mind but in the heart.
Anne Michaels
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I see that I must give what I most need.
Anne Michaels