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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
Rain
Shadow
Present
Happened
Past
Melts
Everything
Fugitive
Never
Shaped
Like
Invisible
More quotes by 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
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
The best teacher lodges an intent not in the mind but in the heart.
Anne Michaels
Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
Anne Michaels
History is the gradual instant
Anne Michaels
The truth doesn't care what we think of it.
Anne Michaels
...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
The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.” from “Memoriam
Anne Michaels
Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them!
Anne Michaels
Any given moment - no matter how casual, how ordinary - is poised, full of gaping life.
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
It is not a person’s depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent.
Anne Michaels
I'm naive enough to think that love is always good no matter how long ago, no matter the circumstances.
Anne Michaels
To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love.
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
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
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
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
Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.
Anne Michaels
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
