Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
Anne MichaelsRead
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.
Interpretation
Love changes our perception of the world around us.
This quote by Anne Michaels emphasizes the transformative power of love in how we perceive our surroundings. When we love a person or a place, our relationship with it deepens, allowing us to see beauty and significance where we might have overlooked it before. The act of loving shapes and enriches our experiences, suggesting that once we learn to appreciate one landscape or relationship, we can extend that love and understanding to others.
In practice
In a wedding speech to highlight how love transforms our perception of life.
Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.
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.
If love wants you; if you've been melted down to stars, you will love with lungs and gills; with feathers and scales; with warm blood and cold.
Long after you’ve forgotten someone’s voice, you can still remember the sound of their happiness or their sadness. You can feel it in your body.
There's a moment when love makes you believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child.
It was nice - in the dark and the quiet... and her eyes looking back, like there was something in me worth seeing.
Forgive me for startling you with the impetuosity of my sentiments, my dear Scarlett—I mean, my dear Mrs. Kennedy. It cannot have escaped your notice that for some time past the friendship I have had in my heart for you has ripened into a deeper feeling, a feeling more beautiful, more pure, more sacred. Dare I name it you? Ah! It is love which makes me so bold!
I wish people would love everybody else the way they love me. It would be a better world.
God is love, generosity and forgiveness; if we believe in this, we will never allow our weaknesses to paralyse us.
To say ‘I love you’ one must first know how to say the ‘I.’ The meaning of the ‘I’ is an independent, self-sufficient entity that does not exist for the sake of any other person. A person who exists only for the sake of his loved one is not an independent entity, but a spiritual parasite. The love of a parasite is worth nothing.
Love is the veil between lover and lover.
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