Quotes by Michael Ondaatje

the heart is an organ of fire

We own the country we grow up in, or we are aliens and invaders.

I once traveled with a guide who was taking me to Faya. He didnt speak for nine hours. At the end of it he pointed to the horizon and said, Faya! That was a good day.

The desert could not be claimed or owned–it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names... Its caravans, those strange rambling feasts and cultures, left nothing behind, not an ember. All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape.

Here. Where I am anonymous and alone in a white room with no history and no parading. So I can make something unknown in the shape of this room. Where I am King of Corners.

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 mans 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.

How can you smile as though your whole life hasnt capsized

I am someone who has a cold heart. If I am beside a great grief I throw barriers up so the loss cannot go too deep or too far. There is a wall instantly in place, and it will not fall.

How we are almost nothing. We think, in our youth, we are the centre of the universe, but we simply respond, go this way or that by accident, survive or improve by the luck of the draw, with little choice or determination on our part.

...how many of us have a moved heart that shies away to a different angle, a millimetre or even less from the place where it first existed, some repositioning unknown to us.

-I think you are inhuman. If I leave you, who will you go to? Would you find another lover?I said nothing.-Deny it,damn you!

I went mad before he did, you killed everything in me. Kiss me,will you. Stop defending yourself.

In the morning she found pieces of a birdchopped and scattered by the fanblood sprayed onto the mosquito net,its body leaving paths on the wallslike red snails that drifted down in lumps.She could imagine the featherswhile she had sleptfalling around herlike slow rain.

Theres water in my bonesa ghost of a chance

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

But his own mind was helpless against every moments headline. He did nothing but leap into the mass of changes and explore them and all the tiny facets so eventually he was completely governed by fears of certainty. He distrusted it in anyone but Nora for there it went to the spine, and yet he attacked it again and again in her, cruelly, hating it, the sure lanes of the probable. Breaking chairs and window glass doors in fury at her certain answers. [15-16]

I am not in love with him, I am in love with ghosts. So is he, hes in love with ghosts.

He refused to believe in his own weaknesses, and with her he had not found a weakness to fit himself against.

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.

You think that you are an iconoclast, but you’re not. You just move, or replace what you cannot have. If you fail at something, you retreat into something else. Nothing changes you.... I left you because I knew I could never change you. You would stand in the room so still sometimes, as if the greatest betrayal of yourself would be to reveal one more inch of your character.