Quotes from Michael Ondaatje

No story is ever told just once.

A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.

As always, books are mystical creatures to him.

For those cities that were great in earlier times must have now become small, and those that were great in my time were small in the time before.… Man's good fortune never abides in the same place.

Nothing will kill you, my friend. You are pure carbon.

Between the kitchen and the destroyed chapel a door led into an oval-shaped library. The space inside seemed safe except for a large hole at portrait level in the far wall, caused by mortar-shell attack on the villa two months earlier. The rest of the room had adapted itself to this wound, accepting the habits of weather, evening stars, the sound of birds.

The right ending is an open door you can't see too far out of. It can mean exactly the opposite of what you are thinking.

as if he were trying to escape the smell of her words as if the air from her talking came into his mouth and filled it puffed it up with poison so the brain was put to sleep and he could do nothing with it only react in his flesh.

Just as no score relies on only one pitch or level of effort from musicians in the orchestra. Sometimes it relies on silence.

Now where does he sit as he thinks of her? These years later. A stone of history skipping over the water, bouncing up so she and he have aged before it touches the surface again and sinks.

Blood a necklace on me all my life.

A person will walk through a hundred doors to carry out the whims of the dead, not realizing he is burying himself away from the others.

Those maps always oppressive with faith, as if the only purpose in life was to journey from one church altar to another rather than cross the meticulous blue of a river to reach a distant friend.

some people you just had to embrace, in some way or another, had to bite into the muscle, to remain sane in their company. You needed to grab their hair and clutch it like a drowner so they would pull you into their midst.

If you grow up with uncertainty, you deal with people only on a daily basis, to be even safer on an hourly basis. You do not concern yourself with what you must or should remember about them. You are on your own.

Commissioner Harris at the far end stared along the mad pathway. This was his first child and it had already become a murderer.

I was a man fifteen years older than she, you understand. I had reached that stage in life where I identified with cynical villains in a book.

Bridge depends on character. Your character and the character of your opponents. You must consider the character of your enemy. This is true of bomb disposal. It is two-handed bridge. You have one enemy. You have no partner. Sometimes for my exam I make them play bridge. People think a bomb is a mechanical object, a mechanical enemy. But you have to consider that somebody made it.

People think a bomb is a mechanical object, a mechanical enemy. But you have to consider that somebody made it.

I had never thought words erotic. Sometimes I really do like to talk more than fuck. Sentences. Buckets of this buckets of that and then buckets of this again. The trouble with words is that you can really talk yourself into a corner. Whereas you can't fuck yourself into a corner." "That's a man talking," muttered Hana.

I come from Divisadero Street. Divisadero, from the Spanish word for 'division,' the street that at one time was the dividing line between San Francisco and the fields of the Presidio. Or it might be derived from the word divisar , meaning 'to gaze at something from a distance.' (There is a 'height' nearby called El Divisadero.) Thus a point from which you can look far into the distance

The ends of the earth are never the points on a map that colonists push against, enlarging their sphere of influence. On one side servants and slaves and tides of power and correspondence with the Geographical Society. On the other the first step by a white man across a great river, the first sight (by a white eye) of a mountain that has been there forever.

Soldiers were coming in with just bits of their bodies, falling in love with me for an hour and then dying.

I don't think clarity is necessarily truth. It's simplicity, isn't it?