Quotes from Michael Ondaatje

if you do not plunder the past, the absence feeds on you

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

Every river they came to was bridge-less, as if its name had been erased, as if the sky were starless, homes doorless.

But we were interested in how our lives could mean something to the past. We sailed into the past.

If he closes his eyes he sees the streets of Asia full of fire. It rolls across cities like a burst map, the hurricane of heat withering bodies as it meets them, the shadow of humans suddenly in the air. This tremor of Western wisdom.

In 1942 the Germans sent a spy called Eppler into Cairo before the battle of El Alamein. He used a copy of Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca as a code book to send messages back to Rommel on troop movements. Listen, the book became bedside reading with British Intelligence. Even I read it.

She lights a match in the dark hall and moves it onto the wick of the candle. Light lifts itself onto her shoulders. She is on her knees. She puts her hands on her thighs and breathes in the smell of the sulphur. She imagines she slap breathes in light.

I thought I was being loved because I was being altered.

He can think now only of objects. Something alive, just one small grey bird on a branch, will break his heart.

Kirpal's left hand swoops down and catches the dropped fork an inch from the floor and gently passes it into the fingers of his daughter, a wrinkle at the edge of his eyes behind his spectacles.

So what was better for us all? An ignorance, or a cautiousness like his, towards our own hearts.

She must have perceived how one could darken and make invisible or at least distant what is unhappy or dangerous in a life; I think her eventual skill with limelight and fictional thunder allowed her to clarify for herself what was true and what was false, safe and unsafe.

A well-told lie is worth a thousand facts

As we left they told us the old joke. To start a journey in a sandstorm is good luck.

In the morning she found pieces of a bird chopped and scattered by the fan blood sprayed onto the mosquito net, its body leaving paths on the walls like red snails that drifted down in lumps. She could imagine the feathers while she had slept falling around her like slow rain.

in Asian gardens you could look at rock and imagine water, you could gaze at a still pool and believe it had the hardness of rock.

He had been slowing down, the way one, half asleep, continually rereads the same paragraph trying to find a connection between sentences.

In a breaker's yard you discover anything can have a new life, be reborn as part of a car or railway carriage, or a shovel blade. You take that older life and you link it to a stranger.

Il y a toujours une histoire, une histoire qui attend. Qui existe à peine. À laquelle on ne s'attache que peu à peu et qu'on nourrit. On découvre la carapace qui contiendra notre personnage et le mettra à l'épreuve. On trouve alors le chemin que sera sa vie. (p.179)

There are those destroyed by unfairness and those who are not.

The jackal with one eye that looks back and one that regards the path you consider taking. In his jaws are pieces of the past he delivers to you, and when all of that time is fully discovered it will prove to have been already known.

As he steps back, away from her into the darkness, she cries out, "How do you live?" And our hero, played by Paul Muni, says, "I steal.

Who had chosen the line for her gravestone, "I have travel'd thro' Perils & Darkness not unlike a Champion.

When Handel had his breakdown, he was, according to my opera-loving mother, "the ideal man" in that state, honourable, loving the world he could no longer be a part of, even if the world was a place of continual war.