Quotes from Michael Ondaatje

Small gestures were enough for him. One bullet ended the war.

They broke the way a man dismantling a mine broke the second his geography exploded.

The war is not over everywhere, she was told. The war is over. This war is over. The war here.

my arms. The lost sequence in a life, they say, is the thing we always search out.

I can never understand someone by his strengths. Nothing is revealed there. I can only understand people by their weaknesses.

Three flutes of champagne in the early afternoon anchored by the weight of nine oysters.

She was secure in the miniature world she had built; the two other men seemed distant planets, each in his own sphere of memory and solitude.

He turns to her, sunlight in his eyes.

This history of mine,' Herodotus says, 'has from the beginning sought out the supplementary to the main argument.' What you find in him are cul-de-sacs within the sweep of history—how people betray each other for the sake of nations, how people fall in love....

You did not speak for some time. You felt safer that way.

minor anarchy was still in me.

Birds prefer trees with dead branches,' said Caravaggio. 'They have complete vistas from where they perch. They can take off in any direction.

But isn't it important for you to think she is smarter than you in order to fall in love?

You're an archaeologist. Truth comes finally into the light. It's in the bones and sediment. It's in character and nuance and mood. That is what governs us in our lives, that's not the truth. For the living it is the truth.

This is where I learned that sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us. Just as there is, in the real landscape of Paris in Les Misérables, that small fictional street Victor Hugo provides for Jean Valjean to slip into, in which to hide from his pursuers.

But I wanted to erase my name and the place I had come from. By the time the war arrived, after ten years in the desert, it was easy for me to slip across borders, not to belong to anyone, to any nation.

Ä°nsan?n aÄŸz? kendisine olan güvenini ya da güvensizliÄŸini, k?sacas? kiÅŸiliÄŸiyle ilgili pek çok ayr?nt?y? ele verir.

Mockery had gone too far during Hearts. There had been an attempt at strangulation and then her ear had been perforated by a fork.

I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife.

Not that we are touched by such things as concern, even if false, when we are young. But now, in retrospect, I am touched.

Fenelon-Barnes wanted the fossil trees he discovered to bear his name. He even wanted a tribe to take his name, and spent a year on the negotiations. Then Bauchan outdid him, having a type of sand dune named after him. But I wanted to erase my name and the place I had come from. By the time war arrived, after ten years in the desert, it was easy for me to slip across borders, not to belong to anyone, to any nation.

In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals.

She thrilled to open space and weather nights, as if she could never be contained or fully revealed there.

There are no brunettes...among Florentine Madonnas.