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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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Anne Michaels
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: April 15
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
City of Toronto
Arms
Skulls
Inside
Tail
Born
Emerge
Someone
Brushes
Long
Tails
Love
Wake
Terror
Skull
Lucky
Unlucky

More quotes by 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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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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...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
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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.
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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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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Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.
Anne Michaels
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Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them!
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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The truth doesn't care what we think of it.
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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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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There's a moment when love makes you believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child.
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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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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Any given moment - no matter how casual, how ordinary - is poised, full of gaping life.
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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History is the gradual instant
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