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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.

Anne Michaels

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Anne Michaels
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: April 15
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
City of Toronto
Warm
Cold
Wants
Blood
Gills
Stars
Melted
Love
Feathers
Lungs
Scales

More quotes by Anne Michaels

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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.
Anne Michaels
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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
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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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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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Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
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
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Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.
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.
Anne Michaels
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The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.” from “Memoriam
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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Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them!
Anne Michaels
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I see that I must give what I most need.
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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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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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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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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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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History is the gradual instant
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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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