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There are so many things, he said quietly, that we can't see but that we believe in, so many places that seem to possess an unaccountable feeling, a presence, an absence. Sometimes it takes time to learn this, like a child who suddenly realizes for the first time that the ball he threw over the fence has not disappeared.
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Anne Michaels |
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our bodies surround what has always been there
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Anne Michaels |
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The winter street is a salt cave. The snow has stopped falling and it's very cold. The cold is spectacular, penetrating. The street has been silenced, a theatre of whiteness, drifts like frozen waves. Crystals glisten under the streetlights.
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Anne Michaels |
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the dead lose every sense except hearing.
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Anne Michaels |
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What is a man," said Athos, "who has no landscape? Nothing but mirrors and tides." --
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Anne Michaels |
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The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.
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Anne Michaels |
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I can only find you by looking deeper, that's how love leads us into the world.
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Anne Michaels |
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I do not believe home is where we're born, or the place we grew up, not a birthright or an inheritance, not a name, or blood or country. It is not even the soft part that hurts when touched, that defines our loneliness the way a bowl defines water. It will not be located in a smell or taste or talisman or a word... Home is our first real mistake. It is the one error that changes everything, the one lesson you could let destroy you. It is fr..
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Anne Michaels |
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To survive was to escape fate. But if you escape your fate, whose life do you then step into?
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survival
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Anne Michaels |
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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.
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Anne Michaels |
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There was no energy of a narrative in my family, not even the fervour of an elegy.
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Anne Michaels |
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At night, a few lights marked port and starboard of these gargantuan industrial forms, and I filled them with loneliness. I listened to these dark shapes as if they were black spaces in music, a musician learning the silences of a piece. I felt this was my truth. That my life could not be stored in any language but only in silence; the moment I looked into the room and took in only what was visible, not vanished. The moment I failed to see ..
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Anne Michaels |
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If the truth is not in the face, then where is it? In the hands! In the hands.
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Anne Michaels |
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I can't save a boy from a burning building. Instead he must save me from the attempt; he must jump to earth.
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Anne Michaels |
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Like the moon, I want to touch places just by looking. To tell new things at three in the morning, when we're
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Anne Michaels |
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Sometimes I can't look you in the eye; you're like a building that's burned out inside, with the outer wall still standing.
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Anne Michaels |
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When you are alone -- at sea, in the polar dark -- an absence can keep you alive.
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Anne Michaels |