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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
Happened
Past
Melts
Fugitive
Everything
Shaped
Never
Invisible
Like
Rain
Shadow
Present

More quotes by Anne Michaels

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Love makes you see a place differently, just as you hold differently an object that belongs to someone you love. If you know one landscape well, you will look at all other landscapes differently. And if you learn to love one place, sometimes you can also learn to love another.
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History is the gradual instant
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Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
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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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It is not a person’s depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent.
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I see that I must give what I most need.
Anne Michaels
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The best teacher lodges an intent not in the mind but in the heart.
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Important lessons: look carefully record what you see. Find a way to make beauty necessary find a way to make necessity beautiful.
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To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love.
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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.
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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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Any given moment - no matter how casual, how ordinary - is poised, full of gaping life.
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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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I'm naive enough to think that love is always good no matter how long ago, no matter the circumstances.
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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.
Anne Michaels
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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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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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The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.” from “Memoriam
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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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