Quotes from Michael Ondaatje

Give me a map and I'll build you a city.

I went mad before he did, you killed everything in me. Kiss me,will you. Stop defending yourself.

We own the country we grow up in, or we are aliens and invaders.

So we came to understand that small and important thing, that our lives could be large with interesting strangers who would pass us without any personal involvement.

Meanwhile with the help of an anecdote I fell in love. Words caravaggio. They have a power.

If a wound is great you cannot turn it into something that is spoken, it can barely be written.

Over the years, confusing fragments, lost corners of stories, have a clearer meaning when seen in a new light, a different place.

After that month in Cairo she was muted, read constantly, kept more to herself, as if something had occurred or she realized suddenly that wondrous thing about the human being, it can change. She did not have to remain a socialite who had married an adventurer. She was discovering herself. It was painful to watch, because Clifton could not see it, her self-education.

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.

You know it is the most relaxed thing when you when you sit with a best friend and you know there is nothing you have to tell him to empty your mind. We just stayed there together, silent in the dusk like this, and we were quite happy.

He turns his back to the far shore and rows toward it. He can in this way travel away from, yet still see, his house....he feels he is riding a floating skeleton...Some birds in the almost-dark are flying as close to their reflections as possible.

I love the performance of a craft, whether it is modest or mean-spirited, yet I walk away when discussions of it begin - as if one should ask a gravedigger what brand of shovel he uses or whether he prefers to work at noon or in moonlight. I am interested only in the care taken, and those secret rehearsals behind it. Even if I do not understand fully what is taking place.

He will hear the rain before he feels it, a clicking on the dry grass, on the olive leaves.

For when people leave our company in our time we are never certain of seeing them again, or seeing them unaltered.

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.

Every immigrant family, it seems, has someone who does not belong in the new country they have come to. It feels like permanent exile to that one brother or wife who cannot stand a silent fate in Boston or London or Melbourne. I've met many who remain haunted by the persistent ghost of an earlier place.

But when we are searching for an example of what we no longer have, we see it everywhere.

The deepest sorrow, he thought. Where the only way to survive is to excavate everything.

Her body had been in a war and, as in love, it had used every part of itself.

Fathers die.You keep on loving them in any way you can.You can't hide him away in your heart.

All his life he has avoided permanent intimacy. Till this war he has been a better lover than husband. He has been a man who slips away, in the way lovers leave chaos, the way thieves leave reduced houses.

We find ourselves in a "collage" in which nothing has moved into the past and no wounds have healed with time, in which everything is present, open and bitter, in which everything coexists contiguously….

how many of us have a moved heart that shies away to a different angle, a millimetre or even less from the place where it first existed, some repositioning unknown to us.

Half a page --- and the morning is already ancient.