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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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Anne Michaels
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: April 15
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
City of Toronto
Always
Love
Fugitive
Think
Naive
Thinking
Circumstances
Matter
Enough
Long
Good

More quotes by Anne Michaels

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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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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 shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst.
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The best teacher lodges an intent not in the mind but in the heart.
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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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Any given moment - no matter how casual, how ordinary - is poised, full of gaping life.
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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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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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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.
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
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Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
Anne Michaels
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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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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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The truth doesn't care what we think of it.
Anne Michaels
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To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love.
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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Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them!
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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History and memory share events that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.
Anne Michaels