121 Quotes by Anne Michaels

Love permeates everything, the world is saturated with it, or is emptied of it. Always this beautiful or this bereft.

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

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

When I woke, my anguish was specific: the possibility that it was as painful for them to be remembered as it was for me to remember them; that I was haunting my parents and Bella with my calling, startling them awake in their black beds.

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.

History is the love that enters us through death.

History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers. History is the Totenbuch, The Book of the Dead, kept by the administrators of the camps. Memory is the Memorbucher, the names of those to be mourned, read aloud in the synagogue.

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.

Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful.