Quote

To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love.

Anne Michaels

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Anne Michaels
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: April 15
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
City of Toronto
Intimate
Psychological
Physical
Share
Place
Love
Hiding

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
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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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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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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History and memory share events that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.
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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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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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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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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I see that I must give what I most need.
Anne Michaels
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History is the gradual instant
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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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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Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them!
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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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