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History is the gradual instant

Anne Michaels

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Anne Michaels
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: April 15
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
City of Toronto
Gradual
Instant
History

More quotes by 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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Important lessons: look carefully record what you see. Find a way to make beauty necessary find a way to make necessity beautiful.
Anne Michaels
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Any given moment - no matter how casual, how ordinary - is poised, full of gaping life.
Anne Michaels
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The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.” from “Memoriam
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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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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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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Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.
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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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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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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To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love.
Anne Michaels
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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.
Anne Michaels
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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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The best teacher lodges an intent not in the mind but in the heart.
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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Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
Anne Michaels
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Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them!
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 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