It's a fantastic privilege to spend three or four hundred pages with a reader. You have time to go into certain questions that are painful or difficult or complicated. That's one thing that appeals to me very much about the novel form. Anne Michaels More Quotes by Anne Michaels More Quotes From Anne Michaels Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city. Anne Michaels healinginspirationalbook 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 sadnessvoicelong Important lessons: look carefully; record what you see. Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful. Anne Michaels importantbeautifullooks The truth doesn't care what we think of it. Anne Michaels carethinking 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 landscapelovelooks 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 skullslovelong 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 demandofferinggiving Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You can 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 sacrificephilosophymoving Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them! Anne Michaels silencestoneshelping 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 namesrainpast 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 citiesseadark Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil. Anne Michaels veilskissingreading 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 gracedarknessworld I'm naive enough to think that love is always good no matter how long ago, no matter the circumstances. Anne Michaels long-agolove-isthinking 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 heartbloodthinking It is not a person’s depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent. Anne Michaels ascentdepthpath 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 starswantblood 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 griefbelievechildren The best teacher lodges an intent not in the mind but in the heart. Anne Michaels teachingteacherretirement Any given moment - no matter how casual, how ordinary - is poised, full of gaping life. Anne Michaels momentsmatterordinary
