Anne Michaels Quotes

Truth grows gradually in us, like a musician who plays a piece again and again until suddenly he hears it for the first time

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.

Does it matter if they were from Kielce or Brno or Grodno or Brody or Lvov or Turin or Berlin? Or that the silverware or one linen tablecloth or the chipped enamel pot—the one with the red stripe, han...

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...

Any given moment—no matter how casual, how ordinary—is poised, full of gaping life.

The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst.

I can't save a boy from a burning building. Instead he must save me from the attempt; he must jump to earth.

Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.

History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.

The shawl's bottom edge the clearest blue, as if it has been dipped in the sea. The blue of a glance.

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.

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 extraordina...

To survive was to escape fate. But if you escape your fate, whose life do you then step into?

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 tre...

Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.

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 th...

Even that night, the night he touched one inch of her in the dark, how simply Avery seemed to accept the facts – that they were on the edge of lifelong happiness and, therefore, inescapable sorrow. It...

—If love wants you; if you’ve been melteddown to stars, you will love with lungs and gills, with warm bloodand cold. With feathers and scales. Under the hot gloom of the forest canopy you’ll want to b...

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 bon...

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...