Quotes from Anne Michaels

The winter street is a salt cave. The snow has stopped falling and it's very cold. The cold is spectacular, penetrating. The street has been silenced, a theatre of whiteness, drifts like frozen waves. Crystals glisten under the streetlights.

The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.

Because the moon feels loved, she lets our eyes follow her across the field, stepping from her clothes, strewn silk glinting in furrows. Feeling loved, the moon loves to be looked at, swimming all night across the river.

I can only find you by looking deeper, that's how love leads us into the world.

Sometimes the body experiences a revelation because it has abandoned every other possibility.

If the truth is not in the face, then where is it? In the hands! In the hands.

our bodies surround what has always been there

What is a man, said Athos, who has no landscape? Nothing but mirrors and tides.

To survive was to escape fate. But if you escape your fate, whose life do you then step into?

History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers. History is the Totenbuch, The Book of the Dead, kept by the administrators of the camps. Memory is the Memorbucher, the names of those to be mourned, read aloud in the synagogue.

Perhaps loneliness is the real proof that we belong to something greater than ourselves, the way absence is proof of what was once a presence.

My love for my family has grown for years in decay-fed soil, unwashed root pulled suddenly from the ground. Bulbous as a beet, a huge eye under a lid of earth. Scoop out the eye, blind the earth.

Destruction doesn't create a vacuum, it simply transforms presence into absence.

There was no energy of a narrative in my family, not even the fervour of an elegy.

I can't save a boy from a burning building. Instead he must save me from the attempt; he must jump to earth.

Love permeates everything, the world is saturated with it, or is emptied of it. Always this beautiful or this bereft.

Somewhere there is a man who is not afraid to live in a woman's hope

Like the moon, I want to touch places just by looking. To tell new things at three in the morning, when we're awake with rain or any sadness, or slendering through reeds of sleep, surfacing to skin.

We belong where love finds us.

I'm naive enough to think that love is always good, no matter how long ago, no matter the circumstances. I'm not old enough yet to imagine the instances where this isn't true and where regret outweighs everything.

They waited until I was asleep, then roused themselves, exhausted as swimmers, grey between the empty trees. Their hair in tufts, open sores where ears used to be, grubs twisting from their chests. The grotesque remains of incomplete lives, the embodied complexities of desires eternally denied.

Rain in a foreign city is different from rain in a place you know. I can't explain this, while snow is the same everywhere.

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

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