“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.”
― Anne Michaels, quote from Fugitive Pieces
“There's a moment when love makes you believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child.”
― Anne Michaels, quote from Fugitive Pieces
“Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.”
― Anne Michaels, quote from Fugitive Pieces
“Reading a poem in translation," wrote Bialek, "is like kissing a woman through a veil"; and reading Greek poems, with a mixture of katharevousa and the demotic, is like kissing two women. Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what's between the lines, the mysterious implications.”
― Anne Michaels, quote from Fugitive Pieces
“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.”
― Anne Michaels, quote from Fugitive Pieces
“Any given moment—no matter how casual, how ordinary—is poised, full of gaping life.”
― Anne Michaels, quote from Fugitive Pieces
“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.”
― Anne Michaels, quote from Fugitive Pieces
“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.”
― Anne Michaels, quote from Fugitive Pieces
“...when we say we're looking for a spiritual adviser, we're really looking for someone to tell us what to do with our bodies. Decisions of the flesh. We forget to learn from pleasure as well as pain.”
― Anne Michaels, quote from Fugitive Pieces
“Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them!”
― Anne Michaels, quote from Fugitive Pieces
“Trees, for example, carry the memory of rainfall. In their rings we read ancient weather—storms, sunlight, and temperatures, the growing seasons of centuries. A forest shares a history, which each tree remembers even after it has been felled.”
― Anne Michaels, quote from Fugitive Pieces
“Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.”
― Anne Michaels, quote from Fugitive Pieces
“I'm naive enough to think that love is always good no matter how long ago, no matter the circumstances.”
― Anne Michaels, quote from Fugitive Pieces
“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.”
― Anne Michaels, quote from Fugitive Pieces
“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.”
― Anne Michaels, quote from Fugitive Pieces
“That they were torn from mistakes they had no chance to fix; everything unfinished. All the sins of love without detail, detail without love. The regret of having spoken, of having run out of time to speak. Of hoarding oneself. Of turning one’s back too often in favour of sleep. I tried to imagine their physical needs, the indignity of human needs grown so extreme they equal your longing for wife, child, sister, parent, friend. But truthfully I couldn’t even begin to imagine the trauma of their hearts, of being taken in the middle of their lives. Those with young children. Or those newly in love, wrenched from that state of grace. Or those who had lived invisibly, who were never know.”
― Anne Michaels, quote from Fugitive Pieces
“In Michaela's favourite restaurant, I lift my glass and cutlery spills onto the expensive tiled floor. The sound crashes high as the skylight. Looking at me, Michaela pushes her own silverware over the edge. I fell in love amid the clattering of spoons....”
― Anne Michaels, quote from Fugitive Pieces
“When you are alone - at sea, in the polar dark - an absence can keep you alive. The one you love maintains your mind. But when she's merely across the city, this is an absence that eats you to the bone.”
― Anne Michaels, quote from Fugitive Pieces
“Love makes you see a place differently, just as you hold differently an object that belongs to someone you love.”
― Anne Michaels, quote from Fugitive Pieces
“The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst.”
― Anne Michaels, quote from Fugitive Pieces
“I saved myself without thinking. I grasped the two syllables closest to me, and replaced my heartbeat with your name.”
― Anne Michaels, quote from Fugitive Pieces
“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.”
― Anne Michaels, quote from Fugitive Pieces
“Nothing erases the immoral act. Not forgiveness. Not confession. And even if the act could be forgiven, no one could bear the responsibility of forgiveness on behalf of the dead. Not act of violence is ever resolved when the one who can forgive can no longer speak; there is only silence.”
― Anne Michaels, quote from Fugitive Pieces
“Truth grows gradually in us, like a musician who plays a piece again and again until suddenly he hears it for the first time”
― Anne Michaels, quote from Fugitive Pieces
“Not long after our final lesson, on one of our Sundays at the lake, my father and I were walking along the shore when he noticed a small rock shaped like a bird. When he picked it up, I saw the quick gleam of satisfaction in his face and felt in an instant that I had less power to please him than a stone.”
― Anne Michaels, quote from Fugitive Pieces
“The shawl's bottom edge the clearest blue, as if it has been dipped in the sea. The blue of a glance.”
― Anne Michaels, quote from Fugitive Pieces
“The truth doesn't care what we think of it.”
― Anne Michaels, quote from Fugitive Pieces
“History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.”
― Anne Michaels, quote from Fugitive Pieces
“Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.”
― Anne Michaels, quote from Fugitive Pieces
Anne Michaels
Born place: in Canada
Born date April 15, 1958
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“Amelia stopped before him, her skirts crowded between his parted knees. The clean, salty, evergreen scent of him drifted to her nostrils. “I have a proposition for you,” she said, trying for a businesslike tone. “A very sensible one. You see—” She paused to clear her throat. “I’ve been thinking about your problem.” “What problem?” Cam played lightly with the folds of her skirts, watching her face alertly. “Your good-luck curse. I know how to get rid of it. You should marry into a family with very, very bad luck. A family with expensive problems. And then you won’t have to be embarrassed about having so much money, because it will flow out nearly as fast as it comes in."
"Very sensible.” Cam took her shaking hand in his, pressed it between his warm palms. And touched his foot to her rapidly tapping one.
“Hummingbird,” he whispered, “you don’t have to be nervous with me.”
Gathering her courage, Amelia blurted out, “I want your ring. I want never to take it off again. I want to be your romni forever”—she paused with a quick, abashed smile—“whatever that is.”
“My bride. My wife.” Amelia froze in a moment of throat-clenching delight as she felt him slide the gold ring onto her finger, easing it to the base.
“When we were with Leo, tonight,” she said scratchily, “I knew exactly how he felt about losing Laura. He told me once that I couldn’t understand unless I had loved someone that way. He was right. And tonight, as I watched you with him . . . I knew what I would think at the very last moment of my life.” His thumb smoothed over the tender surface of her knuckle.
“Yes, love?”
"I would think,” she continued,” ‘Oh, if I could have just one more day with Cam. I would fit a lifetime into those few hours.”
― Lisa Kleypas, quote from Mine Till Midnight
“What do you think?” she asked in his voice. “We should totally remember this for Halloween, right?”
― J.R. Ward, quote from Immortal
“Beck sucked in his breath guiltily and held it. After a long moment, she smiled, amused, and gestured with her head for him to ride beside her. He let out his breath slowly, wondering where this sudden admiration of his friend’s physical appearance was coming from. As he considered the uncertainty of these new and stirring feelings, he was without a doubt very certain about one thing. If Kiernan knew, she would bash his skull in.”
― Valerie Zambito, quote from An Oath of the Blood
“Is the bed comfortable?” Please say no. Just give me any reason to get you in my bed.”
― Elizabeth Finn, quote from Brother's Keeper
“Now let’s make nice with the government before they try to pin us for tax evasion.”
― J.J. McAvoy, quote from The Untouchables
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The Boy Who Was Rais...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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