Held Quotes

“We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?”
― Anne Michaels, Held

“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.”
― Anne Michaels, Held

“What we give cannot be taken from us.”
― Anne Michaels, 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.”
― Anne Michaels, Held

“Are we born with feelings already in us, waiting to be recognised?”
― Anne Michaels, Held

“With every tightening of the screw, the tyrant makes our hope more precise. And nothing enrages a tyrant more than hope.”
― Anne Michaels, Held

“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.”
― Anne Michaels, Held

“Do we really need our own misery to teach us to be kind?”
― Anne Michaels, Held

“Perhaps the most important things we know cannot be proven.”
― Anne Michaels, Held

“Who can say what happens when we are remembered?”
― Anne Michaels, Held

“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.”
― Anne Michaels, Held

“Would he know the moment of his death or would it be like night falling.”
― Anne Michaels, Held

“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.”
― Anne Michaels, Held

“truth is the only disguise needed in a corrupt world.”
― Anne Michaels, Held

“And the black sea of evening, and the deep black bonnet and apron of his grandmother climbing up from the harbour, knitting all the while, leading their ancient donkey burdened with heavy baskets of crab. All the women in the village wore their tippie and carried their knitting easy to hand, under their arm or in their apron pocket, sleeves and sweater-fronts, filigree work, growing steadily over the course of the day. Each village with its own stitch; you could name a sailor’s home port by the pattern of his gansey, which contained a further signature—a deliberate error by which each knitter could identify her work. Was an error deliberately made still an error? Coastal knitters cast their stitches like a protective spell to keep their men safe and warm and dry, the oil in the wool repelling the rain and sea spray, armour passed down, father to son. They knitted shorter sleeves that did not need to be pushed out of the way of work. Dense worsted, faded by the salt wind. The ridge and furrow stitch, like the fields in March when they put in the potatoes. The moss stitch, the rope stitch, the honeycomb, the triple sea wave, the anchor; the hailstone stitch, the lightning, diamonds, ladders, chains, cables, squares, fishnets, arrows, flags, rigging. The Noordwijk bramble stitch. The black-and-white socks of Terschelling (two white threads, a single black). The Goedereede zigzag. The tree of life. The eye of God over the wearer’s heart.”
― Anne Michaels, Held

“She felt the loss—the lifetime of it—of every night without him, of their communication, body to body, even in sleep. 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.”
― Anne Michaels, Held

“…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.”
― Anne Michaels, Held

“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.”
― Anne Michaels, Held

“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.”
― Anne Michaels, 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.”
― Anne Michaels, Held

“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.”
― Anne Michaels, Held

“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.”
― Anne Michaels, Held

“There never was a first man in terms of evolution, but there could, Lia suddenly realised, be a last.”
― Anne Michaels, Held

“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.”
― Anne Michaels, Held

“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.”
― Anne Michaels, Held

“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.”
― Anne Michaels, Held

“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.”
― Anne Michaels, Held

“To the historian, every battlefield is different; to the philosopher, every battlefield is the same.”
― Anne Michaels, Held

“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.”
― Anne Michaels, Held

“The nights he had wept next to his sleeping wife, ashamed of his hunger: the longing that his parents might come to him.”
― Anne Michaels, Held