Top 47 Quotes & Sayings by Anne Michaels

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Canadian novelist Anne Michaels.

Last updated on December 21, 2024.

Anne Michaels is a Canadian poet and novelist whose work has been translated and published in over 45 countries. Her books have garnered dozens of international awards including the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Lannan Award for Fiction and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas. She is the recipient of honorary degrees, the Guggenheim Fellowship and many other honours. She has been shortlisted for the Governor General's Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, twice shortlisted for the Giller Prize and twice long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award. Michaels won a 2019 Vine Award for Infinite Gradation, her first volume of non-fiction. Michaels was the poet laureate of Toronto, Ontario, Canada from 2016 to 2019, and she is perhaps best known for her novel Fugitive Pieces which was adapted for the screen in 2007.

Canadian - Novelist | Born: April 15, 1958

Source: Wikipedia

I really believe we read differently when we know even the most banal facts of an author's life.

Anne Michaels

I think there are all kinds of aspects to reality, to domestic reality, and why don't we just talk about them all?

Anne Michaels

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

As any parent knows, part of your mind is always engaged - wondering and worrying that everything is okay and calculating all the stuff that has to get done in the course of a day. When the children are asleep in their beds, I can go where I really need to go in my head.

Anne Michaels

I have a profound resistance to the idea that a reader could say, 'Oh, well, that's her story.' We should all be interested, no matter where we come from, or who our parents are. It's not my province; it's ours. These questions concern us all.

Anne Michaels

I started to write things down, as a very young child, wanting to find a way to remember - to keep close, somehow - moments that made an impression on me.

Anne Michaels

I'm not being naive; I realise there's no such thing as a pure reading. But I'd rather keep myself as far out of it as I can.

Anne Michaels

Certain things can't be approximated, so I'm always interested in getting in another way, one which makes the reader bend in closer to the scene even if that scene, especially if that scene, is painful... Brutal language isn't necessarily the most truthful way of describing a brutal moment.

Anne Michaels

There should be a democracy of voices in literature. There are people who live with a kind of striving and with a certain kind of tenderness - it's not an unusual thing - and maybe that's not written about enough.

Anne Michaels

I've said this before - and I mean it strongly - an abstract concept or a moral issue has to be connected to feeling. If we don't believe it somehow viscerally, we don't really take it in.

Anne Michaels

Fiction allows you to embody certain ideas and give them an emotional reality. The characters allow you to get close viscerally to an idea.

Anne Michaels

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

Anne Michaels

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

The truth doesn't care what we think of it.

Anne Michaels

Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them!

Anne Michaels

History is the gradual instant

Anne Michaels

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

Anne Michaels

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

Anne Michaels

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

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

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

...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

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.

Anne Michaels

I see that I must give what I most need.

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

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.

Anne Michaels

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

Anne Michaels

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

Anne Michaels

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

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

Anne Michaels

I'm naive enough to think that love is always good no matter how long ago, no matter the circumstances.

Anne Michaels

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

Anne Michaels

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

Trees for example, carry the memory of rainfal. 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

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

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

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

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

To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love.

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

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

Anne Michaels

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

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

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

Anne Michaels

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.

Anne Michaels

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

Anne Michaels

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

Anne Michaels