Anne Michaels, 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."

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

"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."

"It's not a person's depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent."

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

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

"All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child."

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

"...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."

"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."

"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."

"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."