Quote

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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Anne Michaels
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: April 15
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
City of Toronto
Seems
Sudden
Something
Strikes
Good
Soon
Stalks
Seem
Simultaneous
Becomes
Tolerated
Though
Stalking
War
Contradictions
History
Contradiction

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Any given moment - no matter how casual, how ordinary - is poised, full of gaping life.
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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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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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...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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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.
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To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love.
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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.
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History is the gradual instant
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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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Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them!
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Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
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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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The truth doesn't care what we think of it.
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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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Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.
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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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History and memory share events that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.
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The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.” from “Memoriam
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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.
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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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