The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Anne Michaels

There was currant toast squishy with butter, caramel-marshmallow squares, strawberry boats oozing custard, chocolate exclairs that exploded with cream when the cats bit into them with their little white teeth and– a special treat for Pleasant– a pie made from thick slices of Bramley apple, with just the right amount of tangy in the tangy-sweet.

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

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.

freedom, loneliness

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.

Truth grows gradually in us, like a musician who plays a piece again and again until suddenly he hears it for the first time

truth, truth-inspirational, truth-of-life

Misty is the color of rain on a window.

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

history, memory

All grief, anyone’s grief…is the weight of a sleeping child.

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.

Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.

Hold a book in your hand and you’re a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.

books, literature, reading, words

Any given moment—no matter how casual, how ordinary—is poised, full of gaping life.