Quotes from Michael Ondaatje

KuÅŸlar ölü dallara konmay? tercih ederler, biliyor musun? Çevrelerini daha iyi görebilirler öyle. Ä°stedikleri yöne uçarlar.

AÅŸk, insan?n kendini ve geçmiÅŸini tüketmesidir.

ÇiçeÄŸi burnunda bir a??k, a??k olduÄŸunun huylar?n? edinir çok geçmeden.

I had reached that stage in life where I identified with cynical villains in a book.

I was a man fifteen years older than she, you understand. I had reached that stage in life where I identified with cynical villains in a book. I don't believe in permanence, in relationships that span ages. I was fifteen years older. But she was smarter. She was hungrier to change than I expected.

She and I had lost each other long ago in those confusions and silences. But now, beside this infant, we were within an intimacy, as when sweat covered her face after a seizure and I would hug her to me. When being wordless had been best.

va trebui sa invat cum sa ti duc dorul

His conversations lost some of their syllables out of shyness.

If you grow up with uncertainty you deal with people only on a daily basis, to be even safer on an hourly basis. You do not concern yourself with what you must or should remember about them.

Swoon, I'll catch you. - Almásy

Quite early on I had discovered the overlooked space open to those of us with a silent life. I didn't argue with the policeman who said I couldn't cycle over a certain bridge or through a specific gate in the fort—I just stood there, still, until I was invisible, and then I went through. Like a cricket. Like a hidden cup of water.

There's no trustworthy recording of ages when seen through the eyes of youth

You have to protect yourself from sadness. Sadness is very close to hate. Let me tell you this. This is the thing I learned. If you take in someone else's poison—thinking you can cure them by sharing it—you will instead store it within you.

There were nights when Cullis would lie beside her, barely touching her with the tip of his finger. He would move down the bed, kissing her brown hip, her hair, to the cave within her. When they were apart he wrote how he loved the sound of her breath in those moments, the intake and release of it, paced and constant, as if preparing, as if knowing there was to be long distance ahead. His hands on her thighs, his face wet with the taste of her, her open palm on the back of his neck.

The youth felt this was his first conversation in years.

Everyone has their own marriages, she thinks.

If a man's life could be capitalized as X, the risk at Y, and the estimated damage from explosion at V, then a logician might contend that if V is less than X over Y, the bomb should be blown up; but if V over Y is greater than X, an attempt should be made to avoid explosion in situ.

Someone's war was slashing apart his delicate tapestry of companions. I was Odysseus, I understood the shifting and temporary vetoes of war. But he was a man who made friends with difficulty. He was a man who knew two or three people in his life, and they had turned out now to be the enemy.

Wherever Hana is now, in the future, she is aware of the line of movement Kip's body followed out of her life. Her mind repeats it. The path he slammed through among them. When he turned into a stone of silence in their midst. She recalls everything of that August day— what the sky was like, the objects on the table in front of her going dark under the thunder.

We are foolish as teenagers. We say wrong things, do not know how to be modest, or less shy. We judge easily. But the only hope given us, although only in retrospect, is that we change. We learn, we evolve. What I am now was formed by whatever happened to me then, not by what I have achieved, but by how I got here.

He had begun to fear her presence during the afternoon dismantling. He had to remove it, or she would be with him every time he approached a fuze. He would be pregnant with her.

as if Morphy had invented a great philosophical profundity on his way to the opera. That happens, of course, when you are not looking at yourself too carefully.

Many books open with an author's assurance of order. One slipped into their waters with a silent paddle...But novels commenced with hesitation or chaos. Readers were never fully in balance. A door a lock a weir opened and they rushed through, one hand holding a gunnel, the other a hat.

We are all the people we have ever known. We carry them for the rest of our lives, across every border we cross