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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
Wants
Blood
Gills
Stars
Melted
Love
Feathers
Lungs
Scales
Warm
Cold

More quotes by 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.
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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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Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them!
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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.” from “Memoriam
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To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love.
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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.
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Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
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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.
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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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Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.
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The truth doesn't care what we think of it.
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History is the gradual instant
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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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The best teacher lodges an intent not in the mind but in the heart.
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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