Quotes from Michael Ondaatje

What was wonderful was that even within the drunkenness of two a.m., each of you somehow recognized the more permanent worth and pleasure of the other. You may have arrived with others, will perhaps cohabit this night with others, but both of you have found your fates.

Whenever her father was alone with a dog in a house he would lean over and smell the skin at the base of its paw. This, he would say, as if coming away from a brandy snifter, is the greatest smell in the world! A bouquet! Great rumours of travel!

Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.

What do you hate most? he asks. -A lie. And you? -Ownership, he says. When you leave me, forget me.

Who realizes how contented feral children are? The grasp of the family fell away as soon as I was out the door.

That was how he felt safest. Revealing nothing.

Wenn wir jung sind, ist uns nicht so sehr die Realität unserer Lage peinlich, sondern wir fürchten uns davor, dass andere sie erkennen und darüber urteilen könnten.

It's resplendent," The Darter claimed that first weekend, one hand on the wheel, the other attempting to remove a sandwich from his pocket. He did not appear fully focused on the steering of the barge. A cold wind scalloped the water, gusting and shuddering against us from all sides.

Tell me, is it possible to love someone who is not as smart as you are? ... In the same way the sexual pleasure of conversation came to me only after I was married. I had never thought words erotic. Sometimes I really do like to talk more than fuck. Sentences...the trouble with words is that you can really talk yourself into a corner. Whereas you can't fuck yourself into a corner.

No one goes back to the husband. He knew that much about love and human nature.

He spends hours with the Englishman, who reminds him of a fir tree he saw in England, its one sick branch, too weighted down with age, held up by a crutch made out of another tree. It stood in Lord Suffolk's garden on the edge of the cliff, overlooking the Bristol Channel like a sentinel. In spite of such infirmity he sensed the creature within it was noble, with a memory whose power rainbowed beyond ailment.

We need parents when we're old too.

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

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

She would sit and read, the book under the waver of light. She would glance now and then down the hall of the villa that had been a war hospital, where she had lived with the other nurses before they had all transferred out gradually, the war moving north, the war almost over. This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.

Daca ti-as incredinta viata mea, ai scapa-o pe jos. Nu-i asa?

If anything she seems calm in this universe of hers.

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.

always curious why Rachel and I never ventured into a life like hers and her vivid example of independence as well as empathy for everything around her.

Intotdeauna si-a dorit cuvinte, le iubea, crescuse printre ele. Cuvintele ii dadeau claritate, ii ofereau o logica, un tipar. Pe cand eu simteam ca vorbele indoaie emotiile ca pe niste nuiele inmuiate in apa.

He rides the boat of morphine. It races in him, imploding time and geography the way maps compress the world onto a two-dimensional sheet of paper.

She thought about Caravaggio--some people you just had to embrace, in some way or another, had to bite into the muscle, to remain sane in their company. You needed to grab their hair and clutch it like a drowner so they would pull you into their midst. Otherwise they, walking casually down the street towards you, almost about to wave, would leap over a wall and be gone for months.

She could not forget the depth of her sleep, the lightness of her plummet.

sketches of Saussure's cyanometer, which distinguished the various blues in the sky.