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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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Anne Michaels
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: April 15
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
City of Toronto
Join
Push
Ghost
Close
Back
Enough
Whispers
Like
World
Ghosts

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. 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
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History is the gradual instant
Anne Michaels
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The truth doesn't care what we think of it.
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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Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
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.
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.
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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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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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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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
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History and memory share events that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.
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.
Anne Michaels
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Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them!
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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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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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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The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.” from “Memoriam
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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I see that I must give what I most need.
Anne Michaels