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The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst.

Anne Michaels

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Anne Michaels
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: April 15
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
City of Toronto
Everything
Fugitive
Never
Shaped
Like
Invisible
Rain
Shadow
Present
Happened
Past
Melts

More quotes by 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.
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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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When a man dies, his secrets bond like crystals, like frost on a window. His last breath obscures the glass.
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Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
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Any given moment - no matter how casual, how ordinary - is poised, full of gaping life.
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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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To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love.
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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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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.
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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 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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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.
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The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.” from “Memoriam
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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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History and memory share events that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.
Anne Michaels
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History is the gradual instant
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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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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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