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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
Cold
Wants
Blood
Gills
Stars
Melted
Love
Feathers
Lungs
Scales
Warm

More quotes by Anne Michaels

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The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.” from “Memoriam
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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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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.
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To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love.
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Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
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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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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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History is the gradual instant
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I see that I must give what I most need.
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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 shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst.
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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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The best teacher lodges an intent not in the mind but in the heart.
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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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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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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 a man dies, his secrets bond like crystals, like frost on a window. His last breath obscures the glass.
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Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them!
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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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Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.
Anne Michaels