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

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
Line
Reeds
Poetry
Hollow
Pure
Orchestra
Dervish
Lines
Awkward
Plaintive
Call
Achieved
Shriek
Wanted
Poem
Shrieking
Even
Rain
Wail
Whose
Reed

More quotes by Anne Michaels

Image
History and memory share events that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.
Anne Michaels
Image
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
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
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
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
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
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
Image
Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
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
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
Image
I'm naive enough to think that love is always good no matter how long ago, no matter the circumstances.
Anne Michaels
Image
The truth doesn't care what we think of it.
Anne Michaels
Image
Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.
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
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
Image
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
Image
Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them!
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
History is the gradual instant
Anne Michaels