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

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Anne Michaels
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: April 15
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
City of Toronto
History
Memory
Forests
Temperatures
Remember
Tree
Rings
Shares
Even
Memories
Trees
Remembers
Example
Weather
Storms
Century
Storm
Temperature
Share
Seasons
Sunlight
Growing
Carry
Forest
Read
Ancient
Centuries
Felled

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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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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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History and memory share events that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.
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The best teacher lodges an intent not in the mind but in the heart.
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Any given moment - no matter how casual, how ordinary - is poised, full of gaping life.
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The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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