Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the profound appreciation for simple things after experiencing extreme hardship and loss.
Anne Michaels' quote speaks to the extraordinary significance of mundane items after the trauma of a horrific experience. After her parents' liberation from a concentration camp, the world that greeted them was unrecognizable and filled with a newfound appreciation for simple pleasures. The quote suggests that the ordinary becomes extraordinary when one has faced the loss of basic comforts, highlighting how human experiences shape our perspectives on life and gratitude.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about resilience, you might quote this to illustrate how hardship can enhance our appreciation for life's simple joys.
More from Anne Michaels
All quotes →Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.
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.
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.
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.
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the last cigarettes are smoked, the loaves are sliced, and lest this be taken for wry sorrow, drown the spider in wine. you are much more than simply dead: I am a dish for your ashes, I am a fist for your vanished air. the most terrible thing about life is finding it gone.
What I really hoped for, no doubt, was to come upon one of those lives which begin nowhere, which lead us through marshes and salt flats, trickling away, seemingly without plan, purpose or goal, and suddenly emerge, gushing like geysers, and never cease gushing, even in death.
Opposition is a natural part of life. Just as we develop our physical muscles through overcoming opposition - such as lifting weights - we develop our character muscles by overcoming challenges and adversity.
When I was going through my transition of being famous, I tried to ask God, why was I here? What was my purpose? Surely, it wasn't just to win three gold medals. There has to be more to this life than that.
We're always looking over our shoulders, 'what they will think, what the press will think, what will this one - am I making the right career move?' When you're young you have to do all that to survive, I suppose.
I'm the one that's got to die when it's time for me to die, so let me live my life the way I want to.