Quotes from Anne Michaels

We made our paints from the bones of the animals we painted. No image forgets this origin.

Sitting alone with Jean, Avery felt for the first time that he was part of the world, engaged in the same simple happiness that was known to so many and was so miraculous. He wanted to know everything; he did not mean this carelessly. He wanted to know the child and the schoolgirl, what she'd believed in and what she'd loved, what she'd worn and what she'd read -- no detail was too small or insignificant -- so that when at last he touched her, his hands would have this intelligence.

The mainland can stretch until it breaks at the weakest points, and those weaknesses are called faults. Each island represented a victory and a defeat: it had either pulled itself free or pulled too hard and found itself alone. Later, as these islands grew older, they turned their misfortune into virtue, learned to accept their cragginess, their misshapen coasts, ragged where they'd been torn. They acquired grace.

True hope is severed from expectation.

Letters should be written to send news, to say send me news, to say meet me at the train station.

The grotesque remains of incomplete lives, the embodied complexity of desires eternally denied

One can look deeply for meaning or one can invent it.

Sometimes things work out differently than you expect, and sometimes that's when the best things happen.

Miss Petitfour loved the little pictures, each in its own serrated frame and each seeming to tell it's own little story.

Minky, the littlest cat, look as if she stepped in snow when she was a kitten and the snow never melted. She is all black except for her white paws and the spots on her head and tail where the snow didn't melt either.

Misty is the color of rain on a window.

Taffy is the color of toast and butter.

the food shortages required inventiveness...Daphne showed me the difference it made if she placed plums in a green bowl or in a yellow bowl before she set them on the table.

Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful. There are places that claim you and places that warn you away. Silence is the response to both emptiness and fullness.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.