Quotes from Michael Ondaatje

This was the inheritance she had come back to, the prior life she had run from. She was once more back in a small repeating universe

Could you waste your life on a gift? If you did not use your gift, was it a betrayal?

He was a man of many doors. Were there other professions he nestled into, even briefly for an hour or two?

The idea of a woman mailing a postcard as part of a promise to two children far away indicated an expansiveness as well as aloneness, a hidden need in her. It signalled two very different states.

In darkness, in any light after dusk, you can slit a vein and the blood is black.

We all slept with Herodotus. "For those cities that were great in earlier times must have now become small, and those that were great in my time were small in the time before.… Man's good fortune never abides in the same place.

What had our relationship been? A betrayal of those around us, or the desire of another life?

It is important to die in holy places. That was one of the secrets of the desert. So Madox walked into a church in Somerset, a place he felt had lost its holiness, and he committed what he believed was a holy act.

the heart is an organ of fire

At night, returning from work, Anil would slip out of her sandals and stand in the shallow water, her toes among the white petals, her arms folded as she undressed the day, removing layers of events and incidents so they would no longer be within her. She would stand there for a while, then walk wet-footed to bed.

During our evenings in borrowed buildings, she would wake suddenly from a deep sleep, see me watching her, and release a guilty and delicious smile. I suppose that was the moment I felt I belonged most to her.

In my work I sometimes borrow Claire's nature, as well as her careful focus on the world.

The Englishman left months ago, Hana, he's with the Bedouin or in some English garden with its phlox and shit.

Could you fall in love with her if she wasn't smarter than you? I mean, she may not be smarter than you. But isn't it important for you to think she is smarter than you in order to fall in love? .... You see, I think it is easier to fall in love with him than with you. Why is that? Because we want to know things, how the pieces fit. Talkers seduce, words direct us into corners. We want more than anything to grow and change. Brave new world.

She swabbed arms that kept bleeding. She removed so many pieces of shrapnel she felt she'd transported a ton of metal out of the huge body of the human that she was caring for while the army travelled north.

He refused to believe in his own weaknesses, and with her he had not found a weakness to fit himself against.

Her face became tougher and leaner, the face Cara-vaggio would meet later. She was thin, mostly from tiredness. She was always hungry and found it a furious exhaustion to feed a patient who couldn't eat or didn't want to, watching the bread crumble away, the soup cool, which she desired to swallow fast. She wanted nothing exotic, just bread, meat.

record collection, with all those lifetimes and desires rhymed and distilled into two or three minutes of a song.

Character, that subtle art, disappeared among them during those days and nights, existed only in a book or on a painted wall.

The scale of the laying of mines in Italy and in North Africa cannot be imagined. At the Kismaayo-Afmadu road junction, 260 mines were found. There were 300 at the Omo River Bridge area. On June 30, 1941, South African sappers laid 2,700 Mark 11 mines in Mersa Matruh in one day. Four months later the British cleared Mersa Matruh of 7,806 mines and placed them elsewhere.

He spoke of how viewers of his films should not assume they understood everything about the characters. As members of an audience we should never feel ourselves wiser than they; we do not have more knowledge than the characters have about themselves. We should not feel assured or certain about their motives, or look down on them. I believe this. I recognize this as a first principle of art, although I have the suspicion that many would not.

But a man dancing close to her? I imagine a response of claustrophobia in her. She thrilled to open space and weather nights, as if she could never be contained or fully revealed there.

There is God only in the desert, he wanted to acknowledge that now. Outside of this there was just trade and power, money and war.

There was something about him she wanted to learn, grow into, and hide in, where she could turn away from being an adult. There was some little waltz in the way he spoke to her and the way he thought.