Quotes from Michael Ondaatje

Girls with poison necklaces to save themselves from torture. Just as women wear amulets which hold their rolled up fortunes transcribed on ola leaf.

In the desert the most loved waters, like a lover's name, are carried blue in your hands, enter your throat. One swallows absence. A woman in Cairo curves the white length of her body up from the bed and leans out of the window into a rainstorm to allow her nakedness to receive it

There's water in my bones a ghost of a chance

The sloshing of their hooves in the paddy field that I heard thirty yards away, my car door open for the breeze, the haunting sound I was caught within as if creatures of magnificence were undressing and removing their wings

It was always raining and cold, and there was no order but for the great maps of art that showed judgement, piety and sacrifice. The Eighth Army came upon river after river of destroyed bridges, and their sapper units clambered down banks on ladders of rope within enemy gunfire and swam or waded across.

Let me tell you about people my age. The worst thing is others assume you have developed your character by now. The trouble with middle age is they think you are fully formed.

The armies indoctrinate you and leave you here and they fuck off somewhere else to cause trouble, inky-dinky parlez-vous.

But he had a serenity that came with the choice of the life he wanted to live. And this serenity and certainty I have seen only among those who have the armour of books close by. I

Ich bin ein Mensch mit kaltem Herzen. Wenn ich mit einem großen Kummer zu tun habe, errichte ich Barrieren, damit das Gefühl des Verlusts nicht zu tief, nicht zu weit eindringen kann. Sofort gibt es eine Mauer, die uneinnehmbar ist. (S. 161)

Mr. Fonseka would not be a wealthy man. And it would be a spare life he would be certain to lead as a schoolteacher in some urban location. But he had a serenity that came with the choice of the life he wanted to live. And this serenity and certainty I have seen only among those who have the armour of books close by.

Menschen im Alter zwischen zwanzig und dreißig Jahren sind damit beschäftigt, ein anderer zu werden.

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.

I was running to Asia and everything would change. It began with that moment when I was dancing and laughing wildly within the comfort and order of my life.

the man used names like passwords, all of them with a brief life span. But this time the thief wished that he had owned the name earlier in his life. He spent the first day imagining moments from his past when he could have been 'Astolphe,' when he might have behaved and participated with more ease and subtlety just for having the epaulette of such a name.

Wasps lay eggs that ate the larvae of butterflies, but then wasps were better for plant life than the beautiful flutterers, just as Liébard knew that it was lazy wealth in the fluttering class that made them mean-spirited.

He has come across a love story. This is only a love story. He does not wish for plot and all its consequences. Let me stay in this field with Alice Gull...

You would stand in the room so still sometimes, as if the greatest betrayal of yourself would be to reveal one more inch of your character.

Still, this was broken stone. It was not a human life.

Now it seemed to others he had choreographed the arc of his career in order to attempt this one trick on the world.

His own life was no longer a single story but part of a mural, which was a falling together of accomplices. Patrick saw a wondrous night web-all of these fragments of a human order, something ungoverned by the family he was born into or the headlines of the day. A nun on a bridge, a dare-devil who was unable to sleep without drink, a boy watching a fire from his bed at night,an actress who ran away with a millionaire- the detritus and chaos of the age was realigned.

We are the real countries, not the boundaries drawn on maps with the names of powerful men.

Here where some ants as small as microdots bite and feel themselves being lifted by the swelling five times as large as their bodies. Rising on their own poison. Here where the cassette now starts up in the next room. During the monsoon, on my last morning, all this Beethoven and rain.

In nearly every house, in nearly every family, there was knowledge of someone's murder or abduction by one side or another

writer, I cannot remember who, spoke of a person having "a confusing grace." With an uncertainty alongside her warmth, that is how Emily has always been for me. You trusted her but she didn't trust herself. She was "good," but she was not that way in her own eyes. Those qualities still had not balanced out somehow, or agreed with each other. She