Quote

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

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Anne Michaels
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: April 15
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
City of Toronto
Whose
Reed
Line
Reeds
Poetry
Hollow
Pure
Orchestra
Dervish
Lines
Awkward
Plaintive
Call
Achieved
Shriek
Wanted
Poem
Shrieking
Even
Rain
Wail

More quotes by Anne Michaels

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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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Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
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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.
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History is the gradual instant
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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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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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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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I'm naive enough to think that love is always good no matter how long ago, no matter the circumstances.
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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.
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The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst.
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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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It is not a person’s depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent.
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To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love.
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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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The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.” from “Memoriam
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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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Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.
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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.
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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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The best teacher lodges an intent not in the mind but in the heart.
Anne Michaels