Quotes from Michael Ondaatje

Half the life of cities occurs at night,' Olive Lawrence warned us. 'There's a more uncertain morality then

the desert, where there is the communal book of moonlight. We were among the rumour of wells. In the palace of winds.

What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves.

Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.

Jung was absolutely right about one thing. We are occupied by gods. The mistake is to identify with the god occupying you.

A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something that feeds him more than water. There is a plant he knows of near El Taj, whose heart, if one cuts it out, is replaced with a fluid containing herbal goodness. Every morning one can drink the liquid the amount of a missing heart.

As if this collection of things is what she is. So we fall in love with ghosts.

I think you are inhuman. If I leave you, who will you go to? Would you find another lover? I said nothing. -Deny it,damn you!

She loves most the wet colours of his neck when he bathes. And his chest with with its sweat which her fingers grip when he is over her, and the dark, tough arms in the darkness of his tent, or one time in her room when light from the valley's city, finally free of curfew, rose among them like twilight and lit the colour of his body.

I want to die on your chest but not yet she wrote sometime in the 13th century of our love

I was fourteen then. He was eighteen. Everything is biographical, Lucien 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.

the lost sequence in a life, they say, is the thing we always search out

Everything that ever happened to me that was important happened in the desert.

Here. Where I am anonymous and alone in a white room with no history and no parading. So I can make something unknown in the shape of this room. Where I am King of Corners.

In spite of her desire for a contained universe, her life felt scattered, full of many small moments, without great purpose. That is what she thought, though what is most untrustworthy about our natures and self-worth is how we differe in our own realities from the way we are seen by others.

So the books for the Englishman, as he listened intently or not, had gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms, missing incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry, as if plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night.

A blind lover, don't know what I love till I write it out

Your own story is just one, and perhaps not the important one. The self is not the principal thing.

I am someone who has a cold heart. If I am beside a great grief I throw barriers up so the loss cannot go too deep or too far. There is a wall instantly in place, and it will not fall.

Nowadays he doesn't think of his wife, though he knows he can turn around and evoke every move of her, describe any aspect of her, the weigh of her wrist on his heart during the night.

The trouble with words is that you can really talk yourself into a corner. You can't fuck yourself into a corner. That's a man talking, muttered Hana.

Sleep is a prison for a boy who has friends to meet.

we order our lives with barely held stories

He came to this country like a torch on fire and he swallowed air as he walked forward and he gave out light