Quotes from Michael Ondaatje

I was about to enter a borderless terrain between adolescence and adulthood

Is this how we discover the truth, evolve? By gathering together such unconfirmed fragments?...Will all of them who have remained incomplete and lost to me become clear and evident when I look back?

Because what she wanted, I suspect, was a world she could fully participate in, even if it meant not being fully and safely loved.

Nicholas Temelcoff is famous on the bridge, a daredevil. He is given all the difficult jobs and he takes them. He descends into the air with no fear. He is a solitary. He assembles ropes, brushes the tackle and pulley at his waist, and falls off the bridge like a diver over the edge of a boat.

I am a man who fasts until I see what I want.

To rest was to receive all aspects of the world without judgement.

Reason was the only thing that might save them, and there was no reason.

Water is the exile, carried back in cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth.

Secrets turn powerless in the open air.

Caravaggio was constantly diverted by the human element during burglaries. Breaking into a house during Christmas, he would become annoyed if the Advent calendar had not been opened up to the date to which it should have been.

Do we eventually become what we are originally meant to be?

If he could walk across the room and touch her he would be sane. But between them lay a treacherous and complex journey. It was a very wide world.

Words are tricky things, a friend of his has told him, they're much more tricky than violins.

a person who, as the line went, would live in many places and die everywhere.

I shall have to learn how to miss you.

We order our lives with barely held stories. As if we have been lost in a confusing landscape, gathering what was invisible and unspoken—Rachel, the Wren, and I, a Stitch—sewing it all together in order to survive, incomplete, ignored like the sea pea on those mined beaches during the war. The greyhound is

But nothing is said of the closeness between two people: how they grew in the shade of each other's presence. No one speaks of that exchange of gift and character --- the way a person took on and recognized in himself the smile of a lover. Individuals are seen only in the context of these swirling social tides.

People are not who or where we think they are. And there is someone who watches from an unknown 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.

A woman should never learn to sew, and is she can she shouldn't admit to it

Our heroes do not usually, after a certain age, teach or guide us anymore. They choose instead to protect the last territory where they find themselves. Adventurous thought is replaced with almost invisible needs. Those who once mocked the traditions they fought against with laughter now provide only the laughter, not the mockery.

I promised to tell you how one falls in love.

I know the devices of a demon. I was taught as a child about the demon lover. I was told about a beautiful temptress who came to a young man's room. And he, if he were wise, would demand that she turn around, because demons and witches have no back, only what they wish to present to you.

A memoir is the lost inheritance.