Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
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
The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst.
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 best teacher lodges an intent not in the mind but in the heart.
Anne Michaels
Any given moment - no matter how casual, how ordinary - is poised, full of gaping life.
Anne Michaels
History is the gradual instant
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
The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.” from “Memoriam
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
To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love.
Anne Michaels
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
Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.
Anne Michaels
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
Important lessons: look carefully record what you see. Find a way to make beauty necessary find a way to make necessity beautiful.
Anne Michaels
I see that I must give what I most need.
Anne Michaels
Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.
Anne Michaels
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
History and memory share events that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.
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
It is not a person’s depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent.
Anne Michaels
Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
Anne Michaels