Anne Michaels > Quotes

“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, Fugitive Pieces

“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, Fugitive Pieces

“Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.”
― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

“Trees, for example, carry the memory of rainfall. 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, Fugitive Pieces

“Reading a poem in translation," wrote Bialek, "is like kissing a woman through a veil"; and reading Greek poems, with a mixture of katharevousa and the demotic, is like kissing two women. Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what's between the lines, the mysterious implications.”
― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

“Important lessons: look carefully; record what you see. Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful.”
― 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

“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, Fugitive Pieces

“Any given moment—no matter how casual, how ordinary—is poised, full of gaping life.”
― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

“When my parents were liberated, four years before I was born, they found that the ordinary world outside the camp had been eradicated. There was no more simple meal, no thing was less than extraordinary: a fork, a mattress, a clean shirt, a book. Not to mention such things that can make one weep: an orange, meat and vegetables, hot water. There was no ordinariness to return to, no refuge from the blinding potency of things, an apple screaming its sweet juice.”
― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

“I see that I must give what I most need.”
― Anne Michaels

“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, Fugitive Pieces

“Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them!”
― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

“I'm naive enough to think that love is always good no matter how long ago, no matter the circumstances.”
― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

“Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.”
― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

“...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, Fugitive Pieces

“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, Fugitive Pieces

“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

“The spirit in the body is like wine in a glass; when it spills, it seeps into air and earth and light….It’s a mistake to think it’s the small things we control and not the large, it’s the other way around! We can’t stop the small accident, the tiny detail that conspires into fate: the extra moment you run back for something forgotten, a moment that saves you from an accident – or causes one. But we can assert the largest order, the large human values daily, the only order large enough to see.”
― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

“That they were torn from mistakes they had no chance to fix; everything unfinished. All the sins of love without detail, detail without love. The regret of having spoken, of having run out of time to speak. Of hoarding oneself. Of turning one’s back too often in favour of sleep. I tried to imagine their physical needs, the indignity of human needs grown so extreme they equal your longing for wife, child, sister, parent, friend. But truthfully I couldn’t even begin to imagine the trauma of their hearts, of being taken in the middle of their lives. Those with young children. Or those newly in love, wrenched from that state of grace. Or those who had lived invisibly, who were never know.”
― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

“In every childhood there is a door that closes. Only real love waits while we journey through our grief. That is the real trustworthiness between people. In all the epics, in all the stories that have lasted through many lifetimes, it is always the same truth: love must wait for wounds to heal. It is this waiting we must do for each other, not with a sense of mercy, or in judgment, but as if forgiveness were a rendezvous. How many are willing to wait for another in this way?”
― Anne Michaels, The Winter Vault

“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, Fugitive Pieces

“The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.” from “Memoriam”
― Anne Michaels

“In Michaela's favourite restaurant, I lift my glass and cutlery spills onto the expensive tiled floor. The sound crashes high as the skylight. Looking at me, Michaela pushes her own silverware over the edge. I fell in love amid the clattering of spoons....”
― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

“Love makes you see a place differently, just as you hold differently an object that belongs to someone you love.”
― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

“Truth grows gradually in us, like a musician who plays a piece again and again until suddenly he hears it for the first time”
― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

“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, Fugitive Pieces

“The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst.”
― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

“I saved myself without thinking. I grasped the two syllables closest to me, and replaced my heartbeat with your name.”
― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

“History is the poisoned well, seeping into the ground-water. It’s not the unknown past we’re doomed to repeat, but the past we know. Every recorded event is a brick of potential, of precedent, thrown into the future. Eventually the idea will hit someone in the back of the head. This is the duplicity of history: an idea recorded will become an idea resurrected. Out of fertile ground, the compost of history.”
― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces