Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
Anne Michaels
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Anne Michaels
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: April 15
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
City of Toronto
Veils
Poem
Kissing
Reading
Woman
Fugitive
Like
Translation
Veil
Translations
More quotes by Anne Michaels
Any given moment - no matter how casual, how ordinary - is poised, full of gaping life.
Anne Michaels
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
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
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
History is the gradual instant
Anne Michaels
The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.” from “Memoriam
Anne Michaels
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
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
History and memory share events that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.
Anne Michaels
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.
Anne Michaels
The best teacher lodges an intent not in the mind but in the heart.
Anne Michaels
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
Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.
Anne Michaels
To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love.
Anne Michaels
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
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
It is not a person’s depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent.
Anne Michaels
When a man dies, his secrets bond like crystals, like frost on a window. His last breath obscures the glass.
Anne Michaels
Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.
Anne Michaels
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
