Quotes from Michael Ondaatje

During the day she notices mostly his arms in the short-sleeved army shirt and the rifle which is always with him, even though battles seem now to be over for them. He has various postures with the gun—half-staff, half a crook for his elbows when it is over his shoulders. He will turn, suddenly realizing she is watching him. He is a survivor of his fears, will step around anything suspicious, acknowledging her look in this panorama as if claiming he can deal with it all.

But we were confident that Olive Lawrence had some tracing in her head from a faint light in the distance or a shift of wind that told her exactly where she was and what she was going towards

but the dog's paw was a wonder: the smell of it never suggested dirt. It's a cathedral!

Revealing his past or qualities of his character would have been too loud a gesture.

She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others

Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert. And I? I was the skill among them. The mechanic. The others wrote out their love of solitude and meditated on what they found there. They were never sure of what I thought of it all. For them I was a bit too cunning to be a lover of the desert. More like Odysseus. Still, I was.

I believe in such cartography--to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.

We steered our way up a narrowing cut. It was a different atmosphere now, with sunlight falling through yellowing leaves, the smell of wet earth rising from the riverbanks. We had loaded the barge with boxes at Limehouse Reach, where The Darter said they made quicklime centuries earlier.

One afternoon we needed to urge the barge between the narrowing banks of the Romford Canal, my sister and I stationed on opposite sides of the deck yelling directions to The Darter at the wheel. The last hundred yards of the cut were almost fully overgrown. At its end there was a lorry waiting, and two men approached the boat and unloaded the boxes wordlessly

During certain hours, at certain years in our lives, we see ourselves as remnants from the earlier generations that were destroyed. So our job becomes to keep peace with enemy camps, eliminate the chaos at the end of Jacobean tragedies, and with 'the mercy of distance' write the histories.

She wanted Kip to know her only in the present, a person perhaps more flawed or more compassionate or harder or more obsessed than the girl or young woman she had been then.

He had approached the villa on that night of the storm not out of curiosity about the music but because of a danger to the piano player. The retreating army often left pencil mines within musical instruments. Returning owners opened up pianos and lost their hands. People would revive the swing on a grandfather clock, and a glass bomb would blow out half a wall and whoever was nearby.

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? Think now. 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.

They had all grown older, but he still did not feel he had wisdom to go with his aging.

Çölde yaln?zca su kutsald?r.

They would never have dropped such a bomb on a white nation.

She walks down the hall and climbs into her hammock, giving it a swing as she leaves the ground. Moments before sleep are when she feels most alive, leaping across fragments of the day, bringing each moment into the bed with her like a child with schoolbooks and pencils. The day seems to have no order until these times, which are like a ledger for her, her body full of stories and situations. Caravaggio has for instance given her something. His motive, a drama, and a stolen image.

Ä°ngiliz Hasta'n?n Ä°lk Cümlesi Genç kad?n bahçede çal???rken birden doÄŸrulup uzaklara bak?yor.

She likes to lay her face against the upper reaches of his arm, that dark brown river, and to wake submerged within it, against the pulse of an unseen vein in his flesh beside her. The vein she would have to locate and insert a saline solution into if he were dying.

With his wounds, his unbalance, the grey curls at the back of his neck. He had never imagined himself to be a man with a sense of age and wisdom. They had all grown older, but he still did not feel he had wisdom to go with his aging.

Söyle bakal?m, insan?n kendisi kadar zeki olmayan bir insan? sevmesi mümkün müdür?

Hello Buddy, good-bye Buddy. Caring was brief. There was a contract only until death.

Thieves like us were used a great deal during this war. We were legitimized. We stole. Then some of us began to advise. We could read through the camouflage of deceit more naturally than official intelligence. We created double bluffs. Whole campaigns were being run by this mixture of crooks and intellectuals.

Succinct histories tell us something—that anything peaceful has a troubled past.