Quotes by Michael Ondaatje

Across the valley, a waterfall stumbles down. In a month or two the really hard rains will come down for eighteen hours a day and that waterfall will once again become tough as a glacier and wash away the road. But now it looks as delicate as the path of a white butterfly in a long-exposed photograph.

The sloshing of their hooves in the paddy field that I heard thirty yards away, my car door open for the breeze, the haunting sound I was caught within as if creatures of magnificence were undressing and removing their wings

But there was a discipline, it was just that we didnt understand. We thought he was formless, but I think now he was tormented by order, what was outside it. He tore apart the plot - see his music was immediately on top of his own life. Echoing. As if, when he was playing he was lost and hunting for the right accidental notes. Listening to him was like talking to Coleman. You were both changing direction with every sentence, sometimes in the middle, using each other as a springboard through the dark. You were moving so fast it was unimportant to finish and clear everything. He would be describing something in 27 ways. There was pain and gentleness everything jammed into each number.

A love story is not about those who lost their heart but about those who find that sullen inhabitant who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing—not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a consuming of oneself and the past.

Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again

What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.

In spite of her desire for a contained universe, her life felt scattered, full of many small moments, without great purpose. That is what she thought, though what is most untrustworthy about our natures and self-worth is how we differe in our own realities from the way we are seen by others.

The trouble with words is that you can really talk yourself into a corner. You cant fuck yourself into a corner.Thats a man talking, muttered Hana.

The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.

She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.

She had always wanted words, she loved them, grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape. Whereas I thought words bent emotions like sticks in water.

He knows that the only way he can accept losing her is if he can continue to hold her or be held by her. If they can somehow nurse each other out of this. Not with a wall.

Nowadays he doesnt think of his wife, though he knows he can turn around and evoke every move of her, describe any aspect of her, the weigh of her wrist on his heart during the night.

Do you understand the sadness of geography?

I can never understand someone by his strengths. Nothing is revealed there. I can only understand people by their weaknesses.

Around three a.m. he feels a presence in the room. He sees, for the pulse of a moment, a figure at the foot of his bed, against the wall or painted onto it perhaps, not quite discernible in the darkness of foliage beyond the candlelight. He mutters something, something he had wanted to say, but there is silence and the slight brown figure, which could be just a night shadow, does not move. A poplar. A man with plumes. A swimming figure. And he would not be so lucky, he thinks, to speak to the young sapper again. He stays awake in any case this night, to see if the figure moves towards him. Ignoring the tablet that brings painlessness, he will remain awake till the light dies out and the smell of candle smoke drifts into his room and into the girls room farther down the hall. If the figure turns around there will be paint on his back, where he slammed in grief against the mural of trees. When the candle dies out he will be able to see this. His hand reaches out slowly and touches his book and returns to his dark chest. Nothing else moves in the room. [298]

The Englishman left months ago, Hana, hes with the Bedouin or in some English garden with its phlox and shit.

Jung was absolutely right about one thing. We are occupied by gods. The mistake is to identify with the god occupying you.

Her life with others no longer interests him. He wants only her stalking beauty, her theatre of expressions. He wants the minute secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book.

Aliganaya - the embraceduring an intoxicated walkor sudden arousalwhile driving over speed bumps