“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.”
“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
“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.”
Anne Michaels“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.”
Anne Michaels“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.”
Anne Michaels“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, 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, 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, Fugitive Pieces“It's not a person's depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent.”
Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces“To survive was to escape fate. But if you escape your fate, whose life do you then step into?”
Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces“History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.”
Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces“All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child.”
Anne Michaels, Fugitive PiecesAll in One Creative & Marketing Platform to tell stories at scale
