Quote

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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Anne Michaels
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: April 15
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
City of Toronto
Keep
Miles
Great
Lonely
Even
Distance
Hears
Like
Bird
Hundreds
Planets
Birds
Short
March
Arms
Holding
Head
Apart

More quotes by 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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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.
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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.
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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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Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.
Anne Michaels
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Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them!
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.
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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Any given moment - no matter how casual, how ordinary - is poised, full of gaping life.
Anne Michaels
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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
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The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst.
Anne Michaels
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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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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
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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
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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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...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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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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The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.” from “Memoriam
Anne Michaels
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To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love.
Anne Michaels