Quotes from Anne Michaels

The truth doesn't care what we think of it.

If love wants you; if you've been melted down to stars, you will love with lungs and gills; with feathers and scales; with warm blood and cold.

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 truthful way of describing a brutal moment.

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.

Important lessons: look carefully; record what you see. Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful.

I think there are all kinds of aspects to reality, to domestic reality, and why don't we just talk about them all?

Fiction allows you to embody certain ideas and give them an emotional reality. The characters allow you to get close viscerally to an idea.