Quotes by Anne Michaels

About Anne Michaels:

Anne Michaels is a Canadian poet and novelist.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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...

Anne Michaels

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

Anne Michaels

True hope is severed from expectation.

Anne Michaels

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

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, th...

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

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

Anne Michaels

And she knew for the first time that someone can wire your skin in a single evening, and that love arrives not by accumulating to a moment, like a drop of water focused on the tip of a branch - it is not the moment of bringing your whole life to anot...

Anne Michaels

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 was as if, long ago, a part of him had broken o...

Anne Michaels

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

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

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

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

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 tr...

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

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'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

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 n...

Anne Michaels

Author Bio

  • NameAnne Michaels
  • DescriptionPoet and novelist
  • BornApril 15, 1958
  • CountryCanada
  • ProfessionPoet; Novelist; Educationist; Writer