Quotes from Michael Ondaatje

Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert.

Tell me, is it possible to love someone who is not as smart as you are? ...But isn't it important for you to think she is smarter than you in order to fall in love? ...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.

If she were a writer she would collect her pencils and notebooks and favourite cat and write in bed. Strangers and lovers would never get past the locked door.

Death means you are in the third person.

To rest was to receive all aspects of the world without judgment. A bath in the sea, a fuck with a soldier who never knew your name. Tenderness toward the unknown and anonymous, which was tenderness to the self.

She moved from being a young woman into having the angular look of a queen, someone who has made her face with her desire to be a certain kind of person. He still likes that about her. Her smartness, the fact that she did not inherit that look or that beauty, but it was something searched for and that it will always reflect a present stage of her character.

How we are almost nothing. We think, in our youth, we are the centre of the universe, but we simply respond, go this way or that by accident, survive or improve by the luck of the draw, with little choice or determination on our part.

Love is so small it can tear itself through the eye of a needle

all this Beethoven and rain

How can you smile as though your whole life hasn't capsized

All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.

You return to that earlier time armed with the present, and no matter how dark that world was, you do not leave it unlit. You take your adult self with you. It is not to be a reliving, but a rewitnessing.

I am not in love with him, I am in love with ghosts. So is he, he's in love with ghosts.

she had a laugh that hinted it had rolled around once or twice in the mud.

Women want everything of a lover. And too often I would sink below the surface. So armies disappear under sand. And there was her fear of her husband, her belief in her honour, my old desire for self-sufficiency, my disappearances, her suspicions of me, my disbelief that she loved me. The paranoia and claustrophobia of hidden love.

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.

We are expanded by tears, we are told, not reduced by them.

when someone speaks he looks at a mouth, not eyes and their colors, which, it seems to him, will always alter depending on the light of a room, the minute of the day. Mouths reveal insecurity or smugness or any other point on the spectrum of character. For him they are the most intricate aspect of faces. He's never sure what an eye reveals. but he can read how mouths darken into callousness, suggest tenderness. One can often misjudge an eye from its reaction to a simple beam of sunlight.

In Canada pianos needed water. You opened up the back and left a full glass of water, and a month later the glass would be empty. Her father had told her about the dwarfs who drank only at pianos, never in bars.

He was a man who wrote, who interpreted the world. Wisdom grew out of being handed just the smallest sliver of emotion. A glance could lead to paragraphs of theory.

There was a time when mapmakers named the places they travelled through with the names of lovers rather than their own.

In the desert the most loved waters, like a lover's name, are carried blue in your hands, enter your throat. One swallows absence.

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 hand and clutch it like a downer 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.

Seas move away, why not lovers? The harbours of Ephesus, the rivers of Heraclitus disappear and are replaced by estuaries of silt. The wife of Candaules becomes the wife of Gyges. Libraries burn.