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
appeals certain fantastic four hundred novel pages painful privilege spend three time
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.
war stalking contradiction
Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.
teacher retirement heart
The best teacher lodges an intent not in the mind but in the heart.
strong children past
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.
gratitude sweet book
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.
running mistake wine
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.
giving needs
I see that I must give what I most need.
memories two space
History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.
instant
History is the gradual instant
darkness grace dresses
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.
world ghost enough
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.
psychological hiding share
To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love.
men glasses secret
When a man dies, his secrets bond like crystals, like frost on a window. His last breath obscures the glass.
lonely distance bird
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.