Anne Michaels Quotes

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.

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.

Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.

I see that I must give what I most need.

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.

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

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 best teacher lodges an intent not in the mind but in the heart.

It is not a person’s depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent.

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

When a man dies, his secrets bond like crystals, like frost on a window. His last breath obscures the glass.

History is the gradual instant