Anne Michaels Quotes

When A Man Dies, His Secrets Bond Like Crystals, Like Frost On A Window. His Last Breath Obscures The Glass.

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.

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.

Though The Contradictions Of War Seem Sudden And Simultaneous, History Stalks Before It Strikes. Something Tolerated Soon Becomes Something Good.

The Dead Leave Us Starving With Mouths Full Of Love.” From “memoriam

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.

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.

...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.

History Is The Gradual Instant

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.

The Shadow Past Is Shaped By Everything That Never Happened. Invisible, It Melts The Present Like Rain Through Karst.

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.