Anne Michaels
Anne Michaels
Anne Michaelsis a Canadian poet and novelist. Michaels is the current poet laureate of Toronto, Canada. She is perhaps best known for her novel Fugitive Pieces which was adapted for film in 2007...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth15 April 1958
CountryCanada
love-is thinking long-ago
I'm naive enough to think that love is always good no matter how long ago, no matter the circumstances.
offering giving demand
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.
path depth ascent
It is not a person’s depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent.
mouths starving
The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.” from “Memoriam
heart thinking blood
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.
silence stones helping
Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them!
beautiful important records
Important lessons: look carefully; record what you see. Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful.
rain past names
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.
skulls long tails
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.
love looks landscape
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.
thinking care
The truth doesn't care what we think of it.
sadness voice long
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.
inspirational book healing
Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.
asleep children course engaged mind stuff wondering worrying
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.