Held Anne Michaels Quotes

What we give cannot be taken from us.

Are we born with feelings already in us, waiting to be recognised?

the rain that held the light that fell, the rain that fell, the light that held

There are so many ways the dead show us they are with us. Sometimes they stay deliberately absent, in order to prove themselves by returning. Sometimes they stay close and then leave in order to prove they were with us. Sometimes they bring a stag to a graveyard, a cardinal to a fence, a song on the wireless as soon as you turn it on. Sometimes they bring a snowfall.

He did not believe that the mystery at the heart of things was amorphous or vague or a discrepancy, but a place in us for something absolutely precise. He did not believe in filling that space with religion or science, but in leaving it intact; like silence, or speechlessness, or duration.

Stories told on a battlefield, on a life raft, in a hospital ward at night. In a café that will disappear before morning. Someone overhears. Someone listens, attentive with all his heart. No one listens. The story told to one who is slipping into sleep, or into unconsciousness, never to wake. The story told to one who survives who will tell that story to a child, who will write it down in a book, to be read by a woman in a country or a time not her own. The story told to oneself. The fervent confession. The meandering, repetitive search for meaning in a gesture, in a moment that has eluded the speaker’s understanding for a lifetime. Stories incomprehensible to the listener yet received nonetheless – by darkness, by the wind, by a place, by an unperceiving or unperceived pity, even by indifference. What we give cannot be taken from us.

Places described by a lover are like no other places on earth. To learn a city in this way – boulevards curving, canals, cornices overhead – in the naked embrace, the luxury of listening while your skin is listening. The city slips into your body. And then, if you are fortunate enough to arrive there for the first time with that same lover, or more fortunate still to arrive there after many years with the same lover – then you will enter the place as if in a dream. Your body will recognise the canals, the cornices, the curving boulevards; memory before sight. And that is a great gift, because we arrive most often as strangers; this, of course, is its own pleasure. But this other pleasure – arrival into the memory of a place you’ve never been and yet know in your skin – is the same as arriving into love, that knowledge of something we do not yet know. The kind of love that is like a fatality. The one you never live beyond, no matter what else befalls you.

Loneliness is not emptiness but negation, with all its agonising precision, its absoluteness; exact, active; in every depth of detail, it is the inverse of love, the dark replica of love.

No one would be sent a message he was unable to understand.

We don’t scorn the feeling of falling in love—why do we question other instincts, just as powerful, intangible, unprovable? Premonitions, a sensed presence, intuitions.

…Each day in that place, Alan thought, you started again, as if you didn’t know that luck was a battery being drained, your chances diminishing every minute. As if every day was proof you’d survive the next.

In Mara’s experience, the supernatural was purely the presence of good, the love that burns free of the corpse; always love that tries to escape the human terror.

Only Alan, Mara thought, understood her fury at the obscenity of the shops, aisles of abundance like temple offerings for the gods; at her colleagues' impassioned debates about the merits of certain restaurants as if they were moral questions. She could not adjust the levels in herself, the speed and volume inside, her ever-greater foreboding and rage. She could not acclimatise to the hospital's reliable electricity, ready machinery, shifts that ended, the safe walk home. She could not comprehend her colleagues' banter at the operating table, their self-assigned systems of reward and entitlement. The absence of bombardment.

.... women of science, physicists' widows, whose adored husbands had always been alert to new ideas, and never pretended to drift off when something important had to be said, and who had even shared an appetite for listening. Such love was triumph. They would write as women have always written: late, by lamplight, the children asleep.

Perhaps the most important things we know cannot be proven.

When John remembered his father, he seemed only able to recall fragments - deep feeling, but only pieces - moments together, not even days. Years, an entire life - now only this handful, this heartful.

The nights he had wept next to his sleeping wife, ashamed of his hunger: the longing that his parents might come to him.

... while Helena stood, unable to move from behind the counter, looking at the door, knowing something had just occurred and not knowing what it meant; as if his future had somehow intercepted her, jostling it out of place, just enough to swerve her off course, the single centimetre one way or another that saves one or sets one in the path of an oncoming car.

They did not want much, and they lived on what they earned, leaving the money from his family's business mostly untouched. It was to be their nest egg, their daughter Mara's inheritance. Peter did not have any inclination to live another kind of life. Anna was in agreement, and she had the freedom to go where she was needed.

There is always a gap of time between an object and our seeing it - just as cannot see the stars and just as we do not exist, Hertha thought sadly, to those who might see our starlight.

We think of history as moments of upheaval when forces converge, the sudden upthrust of the ground we're standing on, catastrophe. But sometimes history is simply detritus: midden mounds, ghost nets, panoramic beaches of plastic sand. Sometimes both: a continual convergence of stories unfolding too quickly or too gradually to follow; sometimes, too intimate to know.

The rest of her, the flesh that had grown a soul inside it - suddenly her love for her daughter made her care for it, how could she be so disrespectful of the body that made her dearest Anna?

The fight for necessities - water, food, shelter, schools, hospitals, a common good. As always, he would take his tipper lorry of language and empty the horror in plain view, so no one could claim they had not known. There was nothing more to say and, of course, he would go on saying that same nothing.

There never was a first man in terms of evolution, but there could, Lia suddenly realised, be a last.

There is only one language for each pair of souls. Others eavesdrop but do not understand.

You took Sandor and Marcus and me to see some of those places - the world of your childhood; later, you said you never wanted to return again, as if everything you had known had become a lie - because history, you said, changes the past, not only the future.

Do we really need our own misery to teach us to be kind?

What does a mother say to her child when he wakes in the night, his soul sick with fear? That he is safe in her arms, loved by her forever, nothing can end this love she holds him in, love without end. And he looks into her face, the face of unalloyed love, and slowly he lets this love suffuse him, and they fall asleep in each other's arms, old mother and grown son, separated by hundreds of miles.

Loneliness is not emptiness but negation, with all its agonising precision, its absoluteness; exact, active; in every depth of detail, it is the inverse of love, the dark replica of love.

When we are moved, Paavo thought, when we feel something beyond us, it is the boundary, the limit of the body, that allows us to recognise it. Limit is proof of the beyond. Not the self, but what lies beyond the self.

To the historian, every battlefield is different; to the philosopher, every battlefield is the same.

Was rescue always a kind of love? Peter didn't know, and he was tired now; he would leave it to Alan and his philosophers. But he did know, with certainty, that love was always a kind of rescue. Even when he had no tears left, he would have tears for Anna.

It was something about possession, she thought, about acknowledging what can never belong to you, how we have no right to that nostalgia, and yet, seeing creates a memory, or confers a memory, or confirms a memory...

Who can say what happens when we are remembered?

Would he know the moment of his death or would it be like night falling.

She did not understand for some time why he had plucked her - middle-aged, a pear turning soft in the bowl - from the bookshop. At first, she thought it was because of what she'd been reading behind the counter - Mr. Ayles never objected to his staff reading once the chores were done. And then she thought it was because he had identified her as a specimen of a particular kind, a woman who, for one last moment, was still able to be wounded in that one way; who might, with a single touch, be brought back to life exactly once more. She was convinced it was this gratitude in particular - ignited by his pity - that he could never have enough of, one source of the great flow of gratitude his presence seemed to arouse in everyone.

Marie's daughters would live beyond them, they would change the world, they would avenge their mother and all women who were perceived as a body or brain but never a soul.

History is liminal, the threshold between what we know and can't know; land and sky a single coordinate plane in the mist. The one who rescues the rescuer. Terminal lucidity. The few kilometres, a turn of the head, between surplus and famine. Surgery by the light of a car battery. Stars invisible in daylight.

We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?

Reading in bed is a precision art - knowing the right wattage, high enough to ready by, low enough to fall asleep with the light still on, choosing books not for their content but for their size and weight, knowing the right position in bed so the book won't slide off and hit the floor and wake you again.

She liked books that seemed to begin again at the middle, the way life so often did, the way a day or an evening or a conversation or a song or a long, worthwhile idea so often did. The way love so often did.

She had dressed. She had made room for herself and lain down next to him. What could she give him now? She knew what he would want for her: that stillness might grow to peace. Not still: held.

Marie was a little warrior in a military camp run by men, she would always have to prove herself. How tired we all are, Hertha thought, of persistently needing to say what is right.

And Hertha knew there was no medicine more important than knowing there was someone in the world who knew the very heart of you, and would protect you. Without irony, Hertha thought, mothers of all lands, unite.