Quotes from Michael Ondaatje

He said later it was propinquity. Propinquity in the desert. It does that here, he said. He loved the word--the propinquity of water, the propinquity of two or three bodies in a car driving the Sand Sea for six hours. Her sweating knee beside the gearbox of the truck, the knee swerving, rising with the bumps. In the desert you have time to look everywhere, to theorize on the choreography of all things around you.

He always knew the layered grief of the world as well as its pleasures.

When she woke, she picked up a pair of scissors out of the porcelain bowl, leaned over and began to cut her hair, not concerned with shape or length, just cutting it away—the irritation of its presence during the previous days still in her mind—when she had bent forward and her hair had touched blood in a wound. She would have nothing to link her, to lock her, to death.

It is a strange time, the end of a war." "Yes. A period of adjustment.

I once traveled with a guide who was taking me to Faya. He didn't speak for nine hours. At the end of it he pointed to the horizon and said, 'Faya!' That was a good day.

If you take in someone else's poison – thinking you can cure them by sharing it – you will instead store it within you.

Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise.

Despair young and never look back," an Irishman said. And this is what I did.

Our table's status on the Oronsay continued to be minimal, while those at the Captain's Table were constantly toasting one another's significance. That was a small lesson I learned on the journey. What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.

Solo quiero que sepas que aún no te echo de menos. —Ya llegará.

Sólo quiero que sepas que aún no te echo de menos. —Ya llegará.

The trouble with ideology, Alice, is that it hates the private. You must make it human.

The Germans evacuated Naples on October 1, 1943. During an Allied raid the previous September, hundreds of citizens had walked away and begun living in the caves outside the city. The Germans in their retreat bombed the entrance to the caves, forcing the citizens to stay underground. A typhus epidemic broke out. In the harbour scuttled ships were freshly mined underwater.

Acaso no perdonamos todo a un amante? Perdonamos el egoísmo, el deseo, el engaño, siempre y cuando seamos la causa de ello.

Ora li amava, questi libri rilegati con i dorsi all'italiana, i frontespizi, le illustrazioni ad acquerello, le copertine telate, amava il loro odore, perfino i loro scricchiolii quando li apriva in fetta, quasi si rompesse una serie di minuscole ossa invisibili.

Kimse zenginler kadar kötü olamaz.

Dinlenmek,dünyay? tüm yönleriyle ama hiç yarg?lamadan kabullenmektir.

Welcome to my neck of the woods. I love that phrase. As if it were part of a body.

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

But here they were shedding skins. They could imitate nothing but what they were. There was no defence but to look for the truth in others.

It is when we are old, concerned with our name, our legend, what our lives will mean to the future. We become vain with the names we own, our claims to have been the first eyes, the strongest army, the cleverest merchant. It is when he is old that Narcissus wants a graven image of himself.

Poliziano translated Homer. He wrote a great poem on Simonetta Vespucci, you know her?

The mole's tunnelled chambers are crushed by wheels, The lark's eggs scattered, their owners fled; And the hedgehog's household the sapper unseals. The snail draws in at the terrible tread, But in vain; he is crushed by the felloe-rim. The worm asks what can be overhead, And wriggles deep from a scene so grim, And guesses him safe

As if one of those love potions in A Midsummer Night's Dream had been applied, only what you first saw on waking was not a love object but a source of fear, the source of a pummelling you had been through minutes before.