Quotes from Michael Ondaatje

That there was nothing more assuring than a mask. Under the mask she could rewrite herself into any place, in any form.

A minimál látótér gyönyör?sége

But his own mind was helpless against every moment's headline. He did nothing but leap into the mass of changes and explore them and all the tiny facets so eventually he was completely governed by fears of certainty. He distrusted it in anyone but Nora for there it went to the spine, and yet he attacked it again and again in her, cruelly, hating it, the sure lanes of the probable. Breaking chairs and window glass doors in fury at her certain answers. [15-16]

The way the terrorists in our time can be made to believe they are eternal if they die for the cause of their ruler.

The Bedouin were keeping me alive for a reason. I was useful, you see. Someone there had assumed I had a skill when my plane crashed in the desert. I am a man who can recognize an unnamed town by its skeletal shape on a map. I have always had information like a sea in me. I am a person who if left alone in someone's home walks to the bookcase, pulls down a volume and inhales it. So history enters us.

iubirea e atat de mica incat poate sa se strecoare prin ochiul unui ac.

We have art, Nietzsche says, so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth.

All the time I hate what I am doing and want the other. In a room full of people I get frantic in their air and their shout and when I'm alone I sniff the smell of their bodies against my clothes.

And that would be unconscionable, I suppose, to feel any obligation? Yes. Of course it would. Katherine cliffton The English Patient

He'd been a secretive man for most of his life, and now was disconcerted by the secrets he had kept from himself.

All over the world there must be people like us, Anna had said then, wounded in some way by falling in love—seemingly the most natural of acts.

Across the valley, a waterfall stumbles down. In a month or two the really hard rains will come down for eighteen hours a day and that waterfall will once again become tough as a glacier and wash away the road. But now it looks as delicate as the path of a white butterfly in a long-exposed photograph.

Everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.

Beef in my throat, the food has to climb over it and then go down and meet with all their pals in the stomach. Hi sausage. Hi cabbage. Did you see that fuckin boot. Yeah I nearly turned round 'n went back on the plate. Who is this guy we're in anyway?

Always listening, listening to the wet fluid speech with no order, unfinished stories, badly told jokes that he sober as a spider perfected in silence.

The sun comes every day. Save the string. I put it in lines across the room. I watched him creep his body though the grilled windows. When the sun touches the first string wham it is 10 o'clock. It is 2 o'clock when he touches the second. When the shadow of the first string is under the second string it is 4 o'clock. When it reaches the door it will soon be dark.

When we are young, he thought, the first necessary rule is to stop invasions of ourselves. We know this as children.

1859. Some of the causes of insanity were listed as: ill health, loss of property, excessive use of tobacco, dissipation, domestic affliction, epilepsy, masterbation, home-sickness, injury of the head. The largest category was unknown.

While I have used real names and characters and historical situations I have also used more personal pieces of friends and fathers. There have been some date changes, some characters brought together, and some facts have been expanded or polished to suit the truth of fiction.

We are occupied by gods. The mistake is to identify with the god occupying you.

Aliganaya - 'the embrace during an intoxicated walk' or 'sudden arousal while driving over speed bumps

He was obsessed with the magic of air, those smells that turned neuter as they revolved in his lung then spat out in the chosen key. The way the side of his mouth would drag a net of air in and dress it in notes and make it last and last, yearning to leave it up there in the sky like air transformed into cloud. He could see the air, could tell where it was freshest in a room by the colour.

small talk plunged to its death around him.

Sorun onu kucaklayarak çözümlenmez. Sorunla baÅŸ baÅŸa kal?rsan?z onunla muhabbet etmeyin.