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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Anne Michaels

Image
I see that I must give what I most need.
Anne Michaels
Image
The truth doesn't care what we think of it.
Anne Michaels
Image
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
Image
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
Image
...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
Image
Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them!
Anne Michaels
Image
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
Image
History is the gradual instant
Anne Michaels
Image
The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst.
Anne Michaels
Image
Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.
Anne Michaels
Image
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
Image
Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
Anne Michaels
Image
The best teacher lodges an intent not in the mind but in the heart.
Anne Michaels
Image
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
Image
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.
Anne Michaels
Image
Any given moment - no matter how casual, how ordinary - is poised, full of gaping life.
Anne Michaels
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.” from “Memoriam
Anne Michaels