Quotes from Michael Ondaatje

Don`t talk to me about Matisse the European style of 1900, the tradition of the studio where the nude style woman reclines forever on a sheet of blood. Talk to me instead about the culture generally how the murderers were sustained by the beauty robbed of savages: to our remote villages the painters came, and our white-washed mud-huts were splattered with gunfire.

You must talk to me, Caravaggio. Or am I just a book? Something to be read, some creature to be tempted out of a loch and shot full of morphine, full of corridors, lies, loose vegetation, pockets of stones.

As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.

we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives

First, he though, I need shoes with rubber on the bottom. I need gelato.

I found her message heart-breaking in its cautiousness.

There is so much to know and we can only guess. Guess around him. To know him from these stray actions I am told about by those who loved him. And yet, he is still one of those books we long to read whose pages remain uncut. We are still unwise. It is not that he became too complicated but that he had reduced himself to a few things around him and he gave them immense meaning and significance.

Nothing lasts. Not even literary or artistic fame protects worldly things around us.

We keep wanting to save those who are forlorn in this world. It's a male habit.

those who had risked everything at a riverbend on a left turn and so discovered a fortune.

Their bodies had met in perfumes, in sweat, frantic to get under that thin film with a tongue or a tooth, as if they each could grip character there and during love pull it right off the body of the other.

There was a time when I could have slept with his friend Briffa, for instance. Around him the air was always fraught with possibilities.

This is the thing I learned. If you take in someone else's poison—thinking you can cure them by sharing it—you will instead store it within you.

Miss Lasqueti consumed mostly crime thrillers, which constantly seemed to disappoint her. I suspect that for her the world was more accidental than any book's plot. Twice I saw her so irritated by a mystery that she half rose from the shadow of her chair and flung the paperback over the railing into the sea.

The man named Caravaggio pushes open all the windows in the room so he can hear the noises of the night. He undresses, rubs his palms gently over his neck and for a while lies down on the unmade bed. The noise of the trees, the breaking of moon into silver fish bouncing off the leaves of asters outside. The moon is on him like skin, a sheaf of water.

The important thing is to be able to live in a place or a situation where you must use your sixth sense all the time.

A man not of your own blood can break upon your emotions more than someone of your own blood.

The noise of the trees, the breaking of moon into silver fish bouncing off the leaves of asters outside.

Maybe this is the way to come out of a war, he thinks. A burned man to care for, some sheets to wash in a fountain, a room painted like a garden.

Roman history, Nathaniel. You need to read it. It is full of emperors who cannot tell even their children what catastrophe is about to occur, so they might defend themselves. Sometimes there is a necessity for silence.

We are full of anarchy. We take our clothes off because we shouldn't take our clothes off. And we behave worse in other countries.

He never used words or reason. He just moved dangerously among us.

So many nurses had turned into emotionally disturbed handmaidens of the war, in their yellow-and-crimson uniforms with bone buttons.

The Darter must have been amazed by such rules and beliefs in a pregnant seventeen-year-old girl who would go on to cordon off the bad habits of his life so efficiently.