Quote

History is the gradual instant

Anne Michaels

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Anne Michaels

Image
The best teacher lodges an intent not in the mind but in the heart.
Anne Michaels
Image
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
Image
To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love.
Anne Michaels
Image
Any given moment - no matter how casual, how ordinary - is poised, full of gaping life.
Anne Michaels
Image
History and memory share events that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.
Anne Michaels
Image
Important lessons: look carefully record what you see. Find a way to make beauty necessary find a way to make necessity beautiful.
Anne Michaels
Image
Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
Anne Michaels
Image
Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them!
Anne Michaels
Image
Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.
Anne Michaels
Image
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.
Anne Michaels
Image
The truth doesn't care what we think of it.
Anne Michaels
Image
When a man dies, his secrets bond like crystals, like frost on a window. His last breath obscures the glass.
Anne Michaels
Image
It is not a person’s depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent.
Anne Michaels
Image
The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.” from “Memoriam
Anne Michaels
Image
The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst.
Anne Michaels
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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